Stakeholders decry Nigeria’s poor investment on nutrition

By : Anietie Akpan, Calabar

Date: 6 October 2022 4:53am WAT

Children malnourished at various levels wait to be processed by aid workers for a UNICEF- funded health programme catering to children displaced by drought, at a facility in Baidoa town, the capital of Bay region of south-western Somalia where the spread of cholera has claimed tens of lives of IDP's compounding the impact of drought on March 15, 2017. The United Nations is warning of an unprecedented global crisis with famine already gripping parts of South Sudan and looming over Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia, threatening the lives of 20 million people. For Somalis, the memory of the 2011 famine which left a quarter of a million people dead is still fresh. / AFP PHOTO / TONY KARUMBA

• As over 35 million children are malnourished
Experts and stakeholders on nutrition and health have warned that Nigeria cannot move forward without addressing the issue of nutrition, as over 35 million children in the country are malnourished.

This warning was given in Enugu on Tuesday, at the ongoing five-day workshop on ‘Building Capacity to Mainstream Nutrition into the Investment Agenda,” organised by the Enugu State Ministry of Budget and Planning in collaboration with United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) for select health, nutrition experts, journalists and others from Abia, Enugu, Cross River, Akwa Ibom and eight other states in the South East, South South and the Middle Belt.

One of the facilitators at the workshop, Prof. Kola Anigo, in his paper, ‘The Conceptional Framework on Maternal and Child Nutrition Expanded,’ said that malnutrition is threatening the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as it is a threat to human development.
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He said: “Nigeria is ranked first in Africa and second in the world in terms of number of malnourished children.”

He said that malnutrition, in every form, presents serious threat to human health, and many cases are related to poor diet, as well as inadequate physical activity as statistics from Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) shows that, apart from the 35 million children that are malnourished, 14 million children in the country are stunted, three million are wasted, 24 million are anemic, 25 million people are hungry, while 9.3 million people suffer from acute insecurity.

He said the critical period of vulnerability between conception and a child’s second birthday, which is first 1,000 days, were the consequences of such nutritional deficit, which are potentially irreversible, and, therefore, must be addressed to ensure that children, under the age of five, get adequate feeding with good nutrition to ensure they are mentally and physically developed.

As a way forward, Anigo said that there is need for domestic policy, developed action plan, increased domestic resources for nutrition, generation of quality data, as well as ensuring appropriate use of such data. He also noted that it is essential to keep nutrition high in national agenda, stay focused and align with a common framework, as well as scale up high impact intervention.
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