Delegates during
a visit to the exhibition stand of Entreprise Urwibutso of local
agri-businessman Gérard Sina at Kigali Marriott Hotel on August 26. The
exhibition has been organised on the sidelines of the 11th African
Potato Association (APA) that is underway in Kigali. Emmanuel Kwizera.
Increasing
investment in education as well as the capacity to collect, analyse and
use data will help African countries end malnutrition, experts have
said, in the midst of a rise in cases of malnutrition.
The proposal comes at a time statistics
show a rise in the numbers of undernourished people, rates of stunting
and cases of food wastage on the continent.
According to a recent joint report by the
World Bank, World Health Organisation (WTO) and the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Africa is the only region where the number of
stunted children under five years old has risen between 2000 and 2018.
During that period, stunting on the continent increased from 50.3 to 58.8 million children, the report says.
Delegates during the Africa Nutrition Summit in Kigali on August 26. Emmanuel Kwizera.
In addition to the problem of
under-nutrition, some African regions have recently seen a considerable
increase in the rates of overweight children.
The report states that the percentage of
overweight children has increased from 10.4 per cent to 13 per cent in
Southern Africa and from 8.1 per cent to 10.6 per cent in Northern
Africa.
This, according to experts, calls for special attention of countries to turn around the situation.
Experts from research institutes, academia
and members of Governments have said that this will require increased
investment in nutrition educational programmes and awareness as well as
using data to track progress.
Jacqueline Landman, a Professor at the
University of Southampton, says that using schools as systems of
promoting healthy feeding would be one of the greatest tools to fight
malnutrition.
“Investing in schools that would act as
systems to promote nutrition is critical. This can be done particularly
through school feeding programmes and integrating nutrition educational
content into school systems,” she said.
Landman who was speaking at the General Assembly of the Federation of African Nutrition Societies,
cited Nigeria as one of the countries with a success story when it
comes to promoting school feeding programmes, a domestically funded
programme.
Such programmes have also been initiated in other countries like Rwanda.
Rwanda has been implementing the national food and nutrition policy since 2013.
Part of that included investing in school
feeding and a host of other programmes that provide highly nutritious
fortified food to mothers and children.
Such initiatives have seen the country
make some improvements. For instance, the rate of stunting among
under-five children dropped from 51 per cent to 38 per cent between 2005
and 2015.
Paul Amuna, a Professor the Ghana based at
the University of Health and Allied Sciences, said there were gaps in
nutrition research, making the case for building capabilities for data
collection.
“Reliable data is important and without
it, it is hard to convince governments to invest in nutrition. And
without measuring what we are doing, we cannot achieve results we want,”
he said.
In Ghana, Amuna said, he established a
school health education programme and he has been monitoring its
progress, highlighting that more than 150 villages have now been able to
adopt it.
The programme provides health and
nutrition education and related support services in schools to equip
children with basic life skills for healthy living, which will lead to
improvements in child survival and educational outcomes.
Ghana, just like Kenya, Liberia, Zambia,
Namibia, Niger, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, among others, has now made
considerable progress, especially when it comes to reducing stunting.
Experts also laid out more suggestions,
from re-orienting agricultural priorities from producing high quantities
to producing healthy foods, and sustainably intensifying food
production to strong coordinated governance of land and oceans, among
other things.
Andrew Prentice indicated that it was
equally important for countries to halve food losses and waste, arguing
that Africa had immense opportunities to work with global communities to
resolve nutritional deficiencies.
However, to achieve all that, Dr Anita
Asiimwe, the National Coordinator of National Early Childhood
Development Program (NECDP) noted that it requires coordinated,
sustained evidence-based multi-sectoral nutrition programmes.
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