By Khalid Idris Doya
Forward In Action for Educating Poverty and Malnutrition (FACE-PaM), a Non-governmental organization said that it is currently working in Bauchi and Bogoro Local Government Areas on Maternal Infants and Young Child Nutrition (MYICN) project to improve the living condition of mothers and children in the Bauchi state.
According to the organization’s acting Executive Director, Mrs. Dabis Mwalike, the project is training health service providers to impact them with knowledge on how to address issues surrounding maternal nutrition, exclusive breastfeeding, and counselling, among others.
Dabis speaking during a media visit organised by Alive and Thrive to Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) on its MYICN project yesterday, said, “One of our major findings was that the relationship of some health service providers with their clients who were pregnant women was not cordial due to lack of adequate capacity building and impactful counselling”, the director said.
Mrs Dabis explained that during the training, the service providers were trained on appropriate way to go about with their clients, saying “When we talk about maternal nutrition, sometimes it is not due to lack of food items or classes of foods, but lack of adequate knowledge to know about the needs of take, especially for maternal nutrition”.
According to her, there are those community local foods in the localities that are nutritious to take, but could only be taken when pregnant mothers are adequately informed about their nutriciency and how safe and healthier to take.
She further stated, “With our partnership with Alive & Thrive, we were able to scale-up their understanding and the need to take nutrition as a priority, especially with regards to pregnant women and children under-five years of age”.
“Initially we noticed that some women prefer to go to traditional birth healers to take their delivery but with the MYICN project, we have been able to link more women to the various PHCs.”
“We have implemented the MYICN project in Bauchi local Government areas and Bogoro local Government Area, and we intend to continue with the remaining five local government areas in southern Bauchi State,” Mwalike said.
Also speaking, the Program Manager of African Community and Environmental Health Initiative (ACE-HI), Ibifummilola Juwon Paul, described as very engaging and collaborative their partnership with Alive & Thrive, saying the partnership has mutual respect of working for the good interest of the state and the local government areas of implementation in particular.
“Our partnership with Alive and Thrive has given the organisation more platforms to advocate for the girl child. We have implemented the MYICN project in central Bauchi in Misau and Ganjuwa local Government areas.”
Mrs Atiku Tabawa of Women Empowerment Initiative (WEIN) , representative of the Executive Director, said the organisation’s partnership with Alive and Thrive MYICN project had yielded positive results in the area of visibility.
She said the organisation was currently implementing the MYICN projects in Katagum and Jama’are local governments in Bauchi state, “We started the MYICN partnership with Alive and Thrive in 2022 and it has been fruitful in terms of visibility and community presence in Bauchi State.
“We no longer target children alone but we are also targeting family members, healthcare workers, community leaders in the area of capacity building.
You would recall that Alive and Thrive in 2022 inaugurated the Maternal Infants and Young Child Nutrition (MIYCN) Project in seven states in the country to scale up access to nutrition.
