Neno nutrition status remains pathetic—study

Neno district is still lagging behind on better nutrition consumption among the under-five children and expectant mothers, a rapid assessment baseline survey has shown.

The survey, among others, found that optimal breastfeeding is only done in the first four to six months while knowledge on the same is poor due to lack of support programmes for breastfeeding.

“Out of 144 sampled population in Traditional Authorities Chekucheku, Symon, Mlauli and Dambe, only 6.1 percent of mothers exclusively breastfeed their children of 0-5 months,” reads the survey in part.

The desk officer for Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN)–1 000 Special Days, Patrick Kankwamba said the major stumbling block to such poor practices is lack of knowledge on exclusive breastfeeding as a bigger proportion of mothers are not practising it.

“Mothers do not know that breast milk has all the necessary food for the child up to six months. Most of the mothers tend to stop breastfeeding their children before finishing the two-year period,” he said

The survey also noted that there is a strong indication that most children do not participate in growth, monitoring and promotion largely due to inadequate equipment and human personnel in the district.

Knowledge about supplementary and therapeutic feeding which is universal tends to be a challenge as distance to access these services is a problem and there is no proper monitoring, according to the survey.

To those enrolled for such activities, the study results show that 59.6 percent of mothers, including those unable to measure the time, walk more than one hour to access therapeutic and supplementary services.

At a media orientationn workshop on SUN 1 000 Special Days, United Nations Children Fund (Unicef) communications officer Chikondi Khangamwa said the organisation is willing to assist the SUN movement activities in Neno.

Said Khangamwa: “The SUN activities need multi-sectoral approach to achieve the fight against malnutrition and other related negative effects such as stunting and wasting, whereby communities need to know the best practices in food diversity and adaptation to better behavioral practices which can help the children growth.”

The survey found out that most communities in the district are failing to properly use latrines besides several messages that come along with various service providers in the district.

According to survey, this is due to poor knowledge of critical points for hand-washing with soap as few people were trained on the practice and the information, education communication (IEC) materials used are outdated and very little supervision is done.

To emphasise the strong indicator of poor IEC, the study says: “Despite having 66 percent of the target population having received messages on hand-washing from frontline workers, only 17 percent know the critical points for hand -washing.”

The survey has also found that distance from home to where information on hand-washing can be accessed is long.