Media Practitioners In Nigeria Charged To Be Advocates Of Nutrition For Human Capital Development
Princess-Ekwi Ajide
A report by UNICEF, says in Nigeria, 37% or six million children, are stunted, chronically malnourished or low height for age, and more than half of them severely.
Unfortunately, of this estimated six million children in Nigeria who suffer from severe acute malnutrition, only two out of every ten of them is currently reached with treatment.
It is against this backdrop, that Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria, CS-SUNN, organised a media roundtable on “Investing In Nutrition for Human Capital Development In Nigeria”, to tackle the major challenge of malnutrition in Nigeria which they attribute to poor investment in nutrition.
Speaker after speaker at the one day event in Abuja, agreed that there is a strong link between nutrition and human capital development as human capital development enables individuals to become healthy, educated, so as to contribute effectively to the country’s workforce and productivity, thereby, improving the country’s gross domestic product.
According to Mrs Margret Umoh, of the Federal Ministry of Education, nutrition starts from motherhood because if a mother is not well fed, it affects her child and when the child is stunted, it affects the brain which makes it impossible for such child’s capacity to learn to develop, therefore, will not attain full potential.
The Nutrition Focal Person in the Ministry of Information and National Orientation, Mr Chris Odhomi, outlined the importance of investing in nutrition, saying that it will lead to improved education, gender equality, reduce poverty and improve life opportunities for Nigerians.
According to him, success in nutrition will underpin success in the SDGs set up by the World Health Organisation as everything centres around nutrition and called on Media Practitioners to become advocates so they can contribute to changing the behaviour of the people around them.
For the Media and Communications Officer of CS-SUNN, Lillian Okafor, there is a dire need for the federal government of Nigeria to invest in multiple micro-nutrient supplements as they are key to addressing the burden of anemia in women of childbearing age, especially as UNICEF has accepted to do a counterpart funding for procurement of the multiple micro-nutrient supplements to address the challenge of anemia in Nigeria.
She also called on state governments to key into the project to ensure that investments in nutrition are made so there will be better nutrition outcomes that will contribute effectively to improving the country’s workforce which is related to human capital development goals and outcomes.
The communication officer, said CS-SUNN, realised that the challenges Nigeria had with not attaining her human capital development targets are tied to the urgent state of nutrition in the country, hence the media round table on investing in nutrition for human capital development as policies and thematic areas, need to be funded effectively.
