Foundation ‎Urges FG to Adopt Balance Diet Template to Tackle Acute Malnutrition in IDPs Camps

Adedayo‎ Akinwale in Abuja
A Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), Yellow Jerrycan‎ Save a Child Foundation has urged the federal government to adopt a balance diet template in order to tackle the problem of acute malnutrition currently ravaging various Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in the country.

It warned that if the federal government refuses to move swiftly to put a template in place to savage the situation, it said the government might deal with not just malnutrition, but might have to deal with‎ outbreak of crimes.

‎The Initiator of the foundation, Ms. Adaora Onyechere disclosed this at a press conference in Abuja, with the theme ,”Rice is Not Enough Nutrition Project.”
She noted that a template and a structure were essential in the fight against malnutrition, stressing that there was need to depoliticize the issue and see it more as a time bomb waiting to explode.

Onyechere stated: “The structure and the template should begin with one camp at a time, it is not enough to take 70 truck loads of food to each of the IDPs camp. They need to know what were they being given, what are the intervention plans given, what are the age categories, to what extent are these food going to be distributed and what is the template to be adopted for every other camp.

“We need to harmonise, the federal government is doing all it can, what about citizens participation, what about coordination with institutions like NEMA; I believe that certain duties could overwhelm NEMA as agency, the federal government should begin to adopt template that are being posted by either NGOs, or well tried research organisations to be able to intimate all of these templates across board ‎so that in the time interim we can have a referral and say this has worked for one camp and we can actually duplicate it in other camps, it becomes a template,” she noted.

The Initiator warned that, “if we don’t have a template, we might deal with not just malnutrition we might actually do with‎ outbreak of crimes because what we will begin to see is people leaving camp to look for subtitute for likelihood especially for keep up with nutrition . Rice, oil and onions are not staple foods, when a child has no access to milk, beans after breastfeeding is bound to be malnourished.”

Onyechere stressed that it was not enough to send ‎food to the camps, but taking the right kind of food needed by the people to the camps. She revealed that presently there is an increase of non-balance diet amongst the camps.

“When you look at the formation and the structure and the distribution of the food, the people who need the food usually don’t get the food , the accessibility of the food is not even made available, the people who are supposed to be intervention platform or the template, meaning that those that are supposed to assess how these food are being used are not there to even evaluate it, there is no monitoring and evaluation system‎,” she lamented.

Related Articles