Two years after Nigeria joined Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN)—an international movement to combat malnutrition worldwide—the programme is yet to officially launch in Nigeria.
A national summit to take stock of the ravages of malnutrition on millions of Nigerian children held in February 2012.
But the proposed launch date for SUN has already been postponed three times, from April 30 to May and now tentatively to September 12,
according to the focal person for SUN in Nigeria, Dr Chris Isokponwu, head of nutrition at the federal health ministry.
Addressing a roundtable on the 2013 Lancet Series on Nutrition, organised by the charity Save the Children, he said: “When you launch,
you start the scale-up proper, so this is a period of putting things together and making arrangement and ensuring it flows properly with
high-level participation.
“The movement will not exactly succeed in Nigeria, if there is no participation at state and local government level,” he said.
The World Bank projects nutrition programmes could cost Nigeria around $700 million each year, and the global cost is put at $12 billion annually.
This comes as the 2013 Lancet Nutrition series noted that malnutrition contributed up to 53%—and 60%, according to latest figures—of deaths of children under age five in Nigeria.
At least 10% of the global malnutrition burden is in Nigeria, where 10.9 million are wasted and up to 3.5 million children suffer acute
malnutrition.
The series, the second on nutrition since 2008, noted child nutrition in the first 1,000 days is crucial to cognitive, educational and economic growth.
“These are things we have known in the past, but these series confirms that we have a burden on our hands,” said Beatrice Eluaka, national adviser for Save the Children, which coordinates women-related civil society groups under SUN.
“We are trying to get the coordination right,” said Dr David Olayemi, a nutrition adviser for the charity. “One of the things I have discovered is that it looks like there are always concerted efforts to make sure we don’t get the coordination. It is only in not getting our coordination right that we can continue with our leakages.”
