I’ve known since my college years that I wanted to work in health. I became even more interested when I did volunteer work in Burundi, in Central Africa. The land there is very fertile, anything can grow, and there were fruits and flowers everywhere. I became fascinated with how poverty affected children’s nutrition. I couldn’t understand how, in a country where everything can grow so easily, children were malnourished. I decided to take up a career in public health nutrition.
I feel very passionate about nutrition because I think that it’s fundamental to children’s growth and development. The effects of childhood nutrition last well into adulthood. A country’s progress is also dependent on the quality of its human capital. The foundation of a strong and resilient country, both socially and economically, is its people.
Here in East Asia and the Pacific, there’s a tendency to think that people are just short, that it’s genetic. Everyone can recognize acute malnutrition when a child is thin and sickly. People don’t recognize when children are stunted, or too short for their age.
Proper nutrition is not only about a child’s weight and height – that’s just what we see on the outside. On the inside, good nutrition means that children’s bodies are prepared to fight certain kinds of infections, and that the neurons in their brain are connecting as they grow, even from their time in the womb. This affects their ability to learn, and is associated with higher earnings as an adult. Good nutrition allows children to be part of moving their country forward, to contribute to nation building.
Regional partnership
One of the challenges in Asia-Pacific is that, despite rapid economic growth in the last two decades, there are still pockets of under-nutrition. In some communities, children become vulnerable just because they speak a different language, they belong to an indigenous group, or their family is homeless. These children often don’t receive the same support as others. At the other end of the spectrum, we are also concerned about over-nutrition and the rising childhood obesity rates in the region.
UNICEF East Asia and Pacific has been advocating for national and local leaders to put greater priority on child nutrition. We are helping to shape national laws and guidelines, ensuring children’s nutrition programmes get sufficient funding, and responding to nutrition issues during disasters.
I’m very excited to be working on a nutrition security initiative with the European Union, with the goal of addressing chronic hunger. The Maternal and Young Child Nutrition Security Initiative in Asia (MYCNSIA) covers five countries – Bangladesh, Nepal, Laos, Indonesia and the Philippines. It emphasizes that nutrition security is not just an issue of food, it is the outcome of good health, a healthy environment, and good caring practices.
The main objective of the partnership is to reduce the levels of stunting in children and anaemia in both mothers and children. To do that, we engage not just the health system but also other sectors such as agriculture, education, social protection, water and sanitation (WASH), and the private sector.
For example, on a visit to Indonesia last year I met a facilitator for the national cash transfer programme. He had no health background but became interested and involved in children’s nutrition following a UNICEF training. “I never knew that breastfeeding was so beneficial to children,” he told me. “Now whenever I give out cash to programme participants, I encourage them to breastfeed. I show them how much money they are saving by breastfeeding their babies.” I was so happy to hear him say that.
To help make more of these kinds of linkages, last year MYCNSIA produced a series of country profiles for 29 countries in the East Asia and Pacific region, showing the latest data and related national policies on nutrition, food security, poverty, and key health and demographic indicators. This should be a useful tool to help make more linkages like those I saw in Indonesia.
Nutrition in the Philippines
| Vilma Cortez treats malnourished children and counsels their parents © UNICEF EAPRO/2015/Dorothy Foote |
I recently visited the Philippines to see what UNICEF is doing on the ground to help children. I saw how we are influencing local officials and leaders to understand that good child nutrition is a wise investment. In Davao City, UNICEF had supported local health officials to do a data analysis. The health workers were surprised to discover a number of severely malnourished children. They found that most of these children’s families had fallen through cracks of the social safety net programme because they were homeless and did not have a proper address.
Fortunately, the city mayor Sara Duterte was concerned about these children and providing additional funding to help them. UNICEF worked with the local health office to find and treat severely malnourished children, procure and store therapeutic food, and properly track the children’s recovery. We’re optimistic that they will now be able to continue the programme on their own.
One of the many committed people I met in the Philippines was Vilma Cortez, a nutrition officer working at a health centre in Davao City. Her devotion to the children and their mothers made a big impact on me. The program was completely new to her, but the way she was keeping records for these children demonstrated her concern. Each child had a folder that recorded their progress through notes and pictures, with a signed consent form from the mothers that allowed them to take photos of the children.
Vilma was very human in her approach and cared deeply about the work she was doing. When a mother showed up with a malnourished baby (one of the programme’s enrolees), she told our team of international visitors to wait and gave priority to caring for the mother and child. She made sure the mother was able to wash her hands and gave her clean drinking water for her child so he could easily eat the therapeutic paste. Only after the mother and child were settled did she return her attention to us.
It’s meeting people like Vilma and the community facilitator that gives my work at UNICEF a deeper meaning. In our field we often talk about ‘building capacity’. To me this means helping people who work on the frontline do the best possible job caring for mothers and children on a daily basis. I believe that if we give them the support, tools and information they need, these kind of nutrition interventions can help all children in every community not just survive, but thrive.
The author
Dorothy Foote is regional nutrition specialist at UNICEF East Asia and Pacific
