Ethiopia loses over 16 percent of its GDP due to malnutrition each year. Over the past years, the country has taken important strides towards reducing hunger and malnutrition through nutrition interventions programs.
However, malnutrition is still affecting the country’s economy and its citizens at large. To moderate the situation, child feeding awareness campaigns, organizing mobile health and nutrition teams, screening for acute malnutrition, and supporting community outreach and mobilization activities are critical.
According to documents, Ethiopia costs over 50 billion Birr annually due to malnutrition. This double burden of malnutrition can exist at the individual level, for instance, obesity with deficiency of one or various vitamins and minerals, or overweight in an adult who was stunted during childhood at the household level.
The double burden of malnutrition is characterized by the coexistence of under nutrition along with overweight and obesity, or diet-related non-communicable diseases, within individuals, households and populations and across the life course.
This double burden of malnutrition offers a unique and important opportunity for integrated action on malnutrition in all its forms. Addressing the double burden of malnutrition is decisive in achieving the sustainable development.
Recently, The Calorie Transform Program launched for an innovative Calories Transfer Concept for treatment of double burden of malnutrition aimed to promote, initiate and facilitate the involvement public, private and civil society actors in order to maximize the impact of calorie-nutrition model.
Hiwot Amare, CEO of Nutritional and Executive Director of Nutrition for Education and Development (NEED) said that the program focuses on the creation of innovative solutions for economic development targeting both over and under-nutrition. It provides nutrition counseling and healthy meal services at school and out of school.
Both under nutrition and over nutrition are the outcome of insufficient food intake (hunger) and repeated infectious diseases and happen when more of a nutrient (or nutrients) are taken by the body than needed respectively, she added.
According to reports, percent of children age 6 to 59 months, women age 15 to 49 and men age 15 to 49 with any anemia are under nutrition. Fruit and vegetable consumptions are low in Ethiopia, with over 98 percent of individuals with inadequate consumption.
Lifestyle factors play a key role in the prevention and management of these conditions. Promotion and protection of breastfeeding in the workplace benefits both sides of the double burden of malnutrition. Children who are breastfed experience fewer infections and women who breastfeed reduce their risk of breast cancer, she noted.
City planning for safe, nutritious and healthy diets, building urban infrastructure to ensure access to affordable, safe and nutritious foods in underserved areas, such as in slums, clean water made available in communities and settings where people gather to enable to prevent and reduce under-nutrition risks.
Universal healthcare packages with under nutrition and diet-related prevention. Domestic financing and international donors could contribute to deliver double duty.
Ensuring that financing of both sides of the double burden is effectively tracked would help calorie transfer program. It designed to facilitate school meal programs that can be more effectively aimed to reduce under-nutrition, children’s risk of obesity, provide income to farmers and encourage children to stay in school or learn better when at school, she indicated.
As to her, the program would not only help improve nutrition, but support livelihoods and education that contain double duty actions. To avert the situation, universal health overages such as nutritional counseling, treatment and monitoring are vital.
Abinet Tekle, CEO of NEED Nutritional Products and Services said that as Ethiopia is suffering from double burden of malnutrition, calorie transfer program intends to create calorie equity through a social responsible model from the higher segment population to lower segments in order to ensure access to healthy food. Because of this kind of initiatives have the capacity to reduce the imbalance of individual calorie intake as well as increase the social responsibility of citizens taking part in this program.
The Ethiopian Herald January 9, 2020
BY TSEGAYE TILAHUN
