Bangladesh’s grim malnutrition situation can be overturned by dedicated nutrition workers, a project evaluation report suggests.
With 41 percent under-five children too small in height for their age, and 36 percent underweight, according to BDHS, Bangladesh is one of the malnutrition-burdened countries in the world despite its improved health achievements.But there is no dedicated field staff for nutrition campaigns. Health assistant (HA) and family welfare visitors (FWA) do this as an additional job along with their entire gamut of health and population services.
A Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation initiative, Alive and Thrive, has found four years after the project got underway that community people are responding well to the nutrition workers.
They were popularising proper infant and young child feeding practices that emphasise exclusive breastfeeding up to six month of age, followed by a combination of homemade food and continued breastfeeding until two years.
The project officials at a seminar in Dhaka on Tuesday showed that exclusive breastfeeding practices in the intervention areas had jumped to 80 percent, well above the 64 percent national average.
Introduction of homemade food rose to 85 percent, which was below 50 percent nationally.
“It shows that it’s possible to change,” said Mohammad Raisul Haque, a Program Coordinator at BRAC, which is implementing the Alive and Thrive initiative at the field level.
BRAC began the project in 2009 in 50 Upazillas, recruiting local workers.
The workers were always available to help the mothers whenever they were in any sort of difficulty, Haque said.
They counsel and support mothers from helping them to properly hold the babies while breastfeeding to telling them how and when to feed homemade food.
Commenting on the findings, a few speakers said the government could recruit separate field workers for nutrition works as the health and family planning staff were already overburdened.
But the Director of the Institute of Public Health and Nutrition said they had no plan to recruit separate nutrition workers.
“Our focus is to give service to the people at the community level with Community Clinics (CCs),” Mohammad Hedayetul Islam told journalists. “It’s possible; it is not so difficult”.
But he said “if any development partner comes forward”, they would be welcomed.
The Director said they had already trained up community healthcare providers and more training would be given to health assistants and family welfare visitors.-bdnews24.com
