Adedayo Akinwale
Yellow Jerrycan Save a Child Foundation, a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), 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, malnutrition may not be the only problem, but 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 depoliticise 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 truckloads of food to each of the IDPs camp. They need to know what they were being given. They need to know 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 citizen participation, what about coordination with institutions like NEMA (National Emergency Management Agency); I believe that certain duties could overwhelm NEMA as an agency, the federal government should begin to adopt templates 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,” she noted.
The Initiator warned that, “if we don’t have a template, we might deal with not just malnutrition, but situations where IDPs begin to leave camp in search of substitutes for livelihood. Rice, oil and onions are not staple foods, when a child has no access to milk, beans, he or she 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 was 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 it usually don’t get the food, the accessibility of the food is not even made available,” she lamented.
On her part, the representative of Centre for Women and Adolescents Campaign, Hajia Asmau Soda, lamented that the real food required to curb malnutrition were not being provided.
She noted that most of the IDPs are farmers who were willing to farm, stressing that they should be supported to farm rather than buying foods and be distributing to them..
