Enugu state primary health care development agency has commended UNICEF Enugu field office for the assistance and encouragement it has been giving to carry out sensitisation on exclusive breastfeeding programme in the state.
The assistance nutrition officer in the agency Loveth Onwuzuluike who made the commendation while speaking to BusinessDay on 2019 world breastfeeding week and the state’s activities, with the theme “Empower patents ,enable breastfeeding now and for the future” said the agency has embarked on grass root sensitisation of women in all the health facilities in the 17 LGAs in the state with the hope to achieve up to 95% in the intervention.
The sensitisation exercise she said was to educate nursing mothers in the rural areas to have exclusive breastfeeding and all the benefits the children and the mothers stands to gain from it, especially the first yellowish milk.
She advised that a mother of a new born baby suppose to place the baby on breast from zero to one hour after delivering saying that doing that would help in the production of the milk and that the milk has all the nutrients and water the baby would require to fight against any disease in a new born baby.
“Mothers suppose to put the baby to the breast zero water” .
The Agency she said also carry the activities of retraining their workers in the health facilities at the rural areas who are in contact with the mothers because we do not want high rate of death in new born babies.
However despite all these assistance and advocacy from UNICEF the chairmen of Local government councils in Enugu state seems not to understand the importance of the exclusive breastfeeding and do not help maters in the rural areas.
In Awgu local government, when our Reporter visited the nutrition officer Bene Okolo said that the campaign for women to key into exclusive breastfeeding was going on and that health workers in all the health facilities in the communities give talk on exclusive breastfeeding to nursing mothers and it’s important to the children and the mother who do exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months.
Further investigation reveals that lack of fund is a major challenge for the health workers to carry out sensitisation. Local government chairmen believes that the program to save lives of the children from their attitude, are mainly for Donor Agencies and not their responsibility. The chairmen need to be called for a workshop where the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding would be discussed for them to key into the program.
Some mothers who spoke called on the government to kindly extend the maternity leave to enable them meet up with the demands of the office work and some said they did not understand it that they were not properly educated .Nevertheless only few health facilities in Awgu conduct immunisation once a week while others do once in a month a situation that does not give room for proper sensitisation of the nursing mothers in the rural areas .
Also the campaign where nursing mothers were call out for sensitisation and health talks in communities that were sponsored by local government chairmen in the past has been stopped.
The need to sensitise nursing mother on the importance of exclusive breastfeeding should be carried to every community in all the 17 LGAs to reduce child mortality rate, supporting healthy brain development in babies and young children ,protecting infants against infection, decreasing the risk of obesity, reducing health care cost among many other things.
Regis Anukwuoji/Enugu
