‘Gombe home to half of North East’s malnourished kids’

By : Auwal Ahmad, Gombe

Date: 7 August 2019 5:10am 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

The Civil Society Scaling-Up Nutrition in Nigeria yesterday said Gombe State houses 51.2 per cent of the 536,747 malnourished children in the North East geo-political zone.

Its Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Jayne Arinze Egemonye, made the disclosure during a meeting in Gombe.

She said the nation’s child nutrition indicators revealed that the 51.2 per cent under-five population were stunted, 17 per cent wasted, and 33.2 per cent underweight in the state

Egemonye added that the under-five mortality rate in Gombe was 162 deaths per 1000 live births, and a mortality rate of 90 per 1000 live births, according to MiCS 2016.

The organisation called on the state government to increase funding for nutrition in the 2020 budget, release votes timely as well as ensure transparency and accountability for execution of key specific interventions.