36pc U-5 children suffer from stunting
Lack of safe drinking water, poor sanitation and living condition among major reasons
Staff Reporter
The lack of safe drinking water, poor sanitation, hygiene and living conditions are the major causes of stunting among children in the country. At least 36 per cent of children below five years suffer from stunting in Bangladesh. These children are too short for their age, indicating chronic malnutrition, Riad Mahmud, director of Max Foundation, told The Independent.
Mahmud said that in some areas like Chhatak and Sylhet, the prevalence of stunting is significantly higher, affecting up to half of the young children. Against this backdrop, Max Foundation had implemented a project called Growing Up Up Up Project funded by the Dutch National Postcode Lottery by Village Education Resource Centre (VERC), which is working on resource mobilisation, communal development and advocacy of the project.
Red Orange Media and Communications is the strategic partner for the project, while the Royal Institute of Tropical Health (KIT) of the Netherlands is involved in analysing and monitoring the project. Mahmud said stunting undermined childrens growth potential and led to lasting damage, including poor cognition and educational performance during childhood, reduced productivity and lower earnings in adulthood. The main causes of stunting are inadequate nutrition and repeated bouts of infection within the first 1,000 days of a childs life, he added.
He also said the Growing Up Up Up Project aimed to create stunting-free villages, starting with Chhatak upazilla where half the children below five years were stunted. The project was designed to engage with the local community and empower local people, entrepreneurs and government officials to create thriving villages to ensure the healthy growth of children in hard-to-reach areas, he added.
The overall objective of the project was to improve child nutritional status through integrated approach of improving three core components: WASH, Nutrition and Care (SRHR and Safe Motherhood) in the project area, reaching out to 5,500 children and providing nearly 58,000 people with access to clean drinking water, clean toilets and information on hygiene and nutrition.
Beneficiaries from this project would mostly comprise pregnant women and mothers, adolescent women, children, and primary and secondary school children from ethnic minorities in poor rural areas.
As part of the initiative, Max Foundation is going to launch a dedicated website to enable everyone to track the progress of children via the project. The website will be launched at the Nutrition Fair 2018 today, kick starting the annual World Breastfeeding Week. The website would contain a video series of three children from the field whose growth is going to be monitored by Max Foundation till 2019. By following the videos, a visitor will be updated about the childrens gradual progress and field activities. One can also read blogs posted from the field, view research, news and other relevant publications on stunting on the website. The project was launched in September 2017 and is set to run till the end of 2019.
