Malnutrition in its different forms is the biggest cause of under-5 mortality in Africa, it accounts for almost half of all child deaths. Around the world a total of 162 million children under five years are stunted and approximately 52 million children suffer from wasting – a debilitating disease caused by extreme low energy intake, resulting in muscle and fat tissue wasting away.

In 2010, while delivering her speech titled “Change a Life Change the Future”, Hilary Clinton emphasized that improved nutrition during the first 24 months of life provides the child with a valuable “1000 day window of opportunity” for lifelong health and development. Nutritionists and scientists agree, and have shown that tackling malnutrition in children requires dedicated action to improve nutrition from pregnancy to 2 years of age. This implies that solving health problems related to a nutritional deficit will also require that pregnant mothers eat nutritious food at the right time and in the right quantity so that children get a good start in life.

The early days of a child’s life represent a key opportunity to ensure that a path to healthy living is guaranteed. Nutrition officer Dr. Abimbola Ajayi, former Deputy Director of Lagos State Ministry of Health on Nutrition and now a gubernatorial candidate running for Lagos, with over 27 years of post doctoral experience in Human Nutrition explained that “child nutrition is fundamental to a child’s wellbeing, far beyond how many development experts look at it.”

She illustrated her thesis saying that “in a third-world country like Nigeria where over 100 million people live far beyond the poverty line, feeding at all is a major issue, let alone expecting the poor to have appropriate nutrition. Malnourished adults can’t but give birth to malnourished children and sadly that’s how poverty strengthens, the cycle continues.”

Malnutrition can have such serious side effects as slowing brain development Dr. Ajayi explained, “after the age of 3 any delay in brain development or any other adverse effect of malnourishment on a child’s mental development becomes irreversible”.

However, there is a safe and nourishing way to ensure healthy development of a child –breastfeeding “Breastfeeding a child until the age of three will ensure that a child’s mental development is perfect, such that the child’s mental capability puts him/her on a level playing ground with any child in the world” says Dr. Ajayi. However, she was quick to identify why breastfeeding hasn’t yielded the phenomenal results in improving child malnutrition that it’s capable of … she asks “how many women feed their kids till age 3 to make ample use of this natural provision?”

Abimbola feels strongly that the Non-Governmental-Organisations can’t do it all, that the responsibility for feeding the populace lies predominantly with the government. She recognizes UNICEF as the main institution working and making major impact in combating child malnutrition but according to Abimbola many of UNICEF’s contributions fail due to lack of continuity, mainly as a result of inadequate backing from the government. The inability of government to put the right personnel forward to head nutrition projects or departments remains a huge challenge. In her opinion it is an error having medical doctors or those in medical professions head nutrition projects, and these decisions ensure that the projects don’t achieve their main goals “put a nutritionist where a nutritionist is needed and not a medical doctor” Abimbola reiterated.

She concluded “it is the main responsibility of the government to cater for its citizen’s nutritional nourishment” because “nutrition plays a major role in national development”. Good nutrition contributes to children’s mental development and, when people fall ill due to a lack of adequate nutrition, the government will inevitably end up spending more money on her citizens in a medical setting.

***This piece was first published on carmma.org but it has been republished with the permission of the author.

Lanre Olagunju is an hydrologist turned freelance journalist. An alumnus of American College of Journalism, he blogs for the African Union  on the Campaign On Accelerated Reduction Of Maternal, Newborn And Child Mortality In Africa. Follow @Lanre_Olagunju on Twitter.

Views expressed above are solely that of the author and not of Omojuwa.com or its associates.