It is a small government health facility nestled in a hilly part of Kaduna. Its exterior is unembellished and its interior is devoid of the aesthetics usually associated with large hospitals. For most people in the community, it is a lifesaving address.
“Hundreds of children are born here every year,” Asiya (not real name) tells this reporter. Asiya has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and she runs the health facility for the local government.
“Hundreds also come in because of one sickness or the other. The death rate is high in this community because the children are exposed to malaria, diarrhoea, measles, pneumonia and other diseases. The reason is that they are not getting enough food and become malnourished.”
This reporter watched as a crying baby boy was brought in by his mother. She said he was sick and had been crying for a long time. He coughed heavily and intermittently, with yellowish mucous coming out of his nostrils.
According to the mother, he was eighteen months old and weighed 7kg. Asiya told this reporter that a healthy child his age should weigh between 10kg and 11Kkg.
He measured less than 11cm on the mid-upper arm circumference tape and his stomach was well distended. “He is malnourished,” Asiya told his mother in Hausa. “That’s why he is sick. He is not eating well.”
His mother said he had been constantly fed large quantities of ‘kunu’n Gero,’ a millet-based pap.
There are no ready-to-use therapeutic foods in the health centre to give the child. “We used to get a lot of them before,” Asiya said, “But for some months now, we have not been receiving enough. The quantities of the micronutrient pack we get are so small that many children cannot get any at all.”
For years, UNICEF, Vitamin Angels and other international organisations have provided energy-dense micronutrient enhanced pastes to health facilities across the country through the federal and state governments as part of their strategies to reduce malnutrition in the country.
Read also: Nutrition: Can Nigeria achieve any of the Sustainable Development Goals?
International development agencies have been leading the charge in efforts to reduce malnutrition and end malnutrition-related deaths among Nigeria’s children.
UNICEF supports Nigeria’s government to implement the National Plan of Action on Food and Nutrition by strengthening health and community systems and fully integrating nutrition into all aspects of the primary health care system, with a particular focus on community management of acute malnutrition, infant and young child feeding interventions and micronutrient supplementation.
According to the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, 32 percent of children under 5 are stunted, with only 1 in 4 children under six months being exclusively breastfed, and a mere 34 percent of children between 6 and 23 months receiving a sufficiently diverse diet.
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