Over the years, humanitarian nutrition interventions have incorporated sustainability strategies in order to maintain the gains made in rolling back malnutrition in communities. It is in the light of this that the Centre for Community Development and Research Network (CCDRN) in its continuous fight against malnutrition conducted a practical hands-on training for 13 lead mothers, 20 Community Nutrition Mobilizers (CNMs), and 3 health workers from six communities in Gujba LGA on Tom brown production and programming for the treatment of Moderate Acute malnutrition (MAM) for children from 6 – 59 months being recorded in their routine active case finding activities.
CCDRN is implementing the United Nations OCHA NHF Nutrition project in 18 communities across Bade, Gujba, and Gulani LGAs of Yobe state with the aim of strengthen the quality and scale-up preventative nutrition services for the most vulnerable groups through community management of acute malnutrition for children from 6 – 59 months in the state.
The training was a precursor to the main activity which took place at the community level across the 3 LGAs. The lead mothers that were trained had a step down session with women in the community under the supervision of the CCDRN nutrition team on Tom brown production and how they can incorporate it into the daily nutritional provision of their children. At the end of the process, 241 beneficiaries were given 6kg of Tom Brown for the month of July.
The training set out to equip the capacity of the community women to understand the Tom Brown production process, know the different methods of preparing it to help them in improving the diet of their children and fight moderate acute malnutrition.
Other activities of the month consist of active case findings of both MAM and SAM cases by the CNMs, Mother to Mother (MtM) and Father to Father (FtF) support group meetings where Infant and young Child Feeding (IYCF)messages are shared and mainstreamed.
Now more than ever, this is timely to help combat malnutrition especially in crisis affected communities, seeing that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO), has ranked Nigeria first in Africa and second in the world among countries with the worst malnutrition cases. This was made public in their report tagged: “Fed to Fail? The Crisis of Children’s Diets in Early Life”, where Nigeria was placed second in the global malnutrition burden with 17 million undernourished children.
Now more than ever, this is not only important but necessary because it goes beyond just an intervention for us, but we see it as a concerted collective effort in the war against malnutrition especially in the Northeast of Nigeria.
