World Vision Ghana (WVG) has supported the Sirigu community in the Kassena-Nankana West District of the Upper East Region to improve malnutrition and anaemia among children and women through its Improved Feeding Practices for the First 1,000 Days Project (IFP).
According to the Ghana Health Demographic Surveillance Report 2022, the district is behind in the rates of stunted and underweight children, as well as anemic children and pregnant women.
The World Bank-funded IFP project has, through agricultural interventions, improved the nutritional status of children and women to address issues of malnutrition and anemia in 24 communities in Sirigu.
Speaking on the occasion to mark the end of the project in Sirigu, WVG Health and Nutrition Technical Manager Awurabena Quayeba Dadzie said the project has promoted household-level agriculture to increase access to innovative nutritional supplements for addressing nutritional diseases.
“Throughout the project, we trained over 1,000 mother-to-mother support groups, which are groups of women and male champions who learned about dietary diversity and young infant feeding practices. They also learned about complementary feeding practices and how to use the four-star diet to improve the nutrition of their children.”
“We supported these beneficiaries with over 5,000 poultry birds, and they received the eggs from these birds. They donated some of the eggs to the Child Welfare clinics, where mothers bring their children to be monitored and promoted. This drastically improved the protein intake of the children and also improved some of their nutritional status.”
“Now, over 10,000 children have been supported with micronutrient supplements, as opposed to the planned 4,600 children. We also supported KOKO Plus, a nutritional supplement that was given to children in their food, and overall, it is supported to improve malnutrition in this district.”
Ms. Dadzie urged stakeholders to sustain the gains of the project through knowledge transfer to other communities to help further reduce malnutrition issues in the district. She also hinted that WVG will continue to explore funding opportunities to scale up the project to other districts in the region.
Some beneficiaries told Citi News that the project has positively impacted their livelihoods and improved their nutritional needs.
Ernestina Abealogo, from the Nyngolingo community, said, “Exclusive breastfeeding is the most important thing we learned under the project, and they educated us on how to properly breastfeed our children. The project also taught us about KOKO PLUS as a supplement for our children and how to cook foods with high nutritional value for their growth.”
