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| A woman with her child at their home in Phnom Penh. A campaign launches today to promote complementary feeding for children between the ages of six and 24 months. Photo by Will Baxter |
Friday, 27 April 2012
Bridget Di Certo
The Phnom Penh Post
It could save the government more than US$100 million a year, and all it takes is a few spoonfuls a day.
This is the message from UNICEF and its government partners at today’s launch of the campaign to promote complementary feeding for Cambodian children aged between six and 24 months.
According to a 2010 study, 40 per cent of children in the Kingdom below the age of five years were chronically malnourished (stunted), 11 per cent acutely malnourished (wasted) and 28 per cent underweight, UNICEF nutrition specialist Joel Conkle told the Post by email yesterday.
“It is caused by the inability to afford nutritious food, high rates of infectious diseases and inappropriate feeding practices,” Conkle said.
“Child malnutrition today will have serious long-term consequences for the health of the Cambodian population and for its economic development.
The campaign aims to have mothers and caretakers feed their young children home-made, multi-ingredient rice porridge several times a day to support physical and cognitive development.
Currently, when young children are no longer breastfed, they will eat what the rest of the family eats – which is usually too liquidy and low in nutrition to support the child’s growth.
“In Cambodia, it is estimated that the country loses over $146 million in GDP to vitamin and mineral deficiencies every year,” Conkle said.
“Child malnutrition presents a heavy economic burden on Cambodia’s health system in terms of child health outcomes and adult chronic disease.”
UNICEF states that in order to make children healthy, strong and smart, mothers and caretakers need to provide improved complementary feeding to children six to 24 months of age by feeding them rice porridge that contains food items from all three food groups (vegetable, protein and carbohydrates) and ensure that the food is thick enough to stay on a spoon.
The campaign will include a nationwide education and training to deliver this message to all households.
2 comments:
Cambodian children like this child need to be fed with enough nutrition food and enough protein sources to help children grow and become smarter. It is very important for all parents to learn how to take a good care of their own children by going to get help from Non-Profit Organization and generous international fundraising organizations in Cambodia. Reporters should know how to guide and provide information to poor Cambodian parents of children like this child in order to get the helps. CPP Government is shitty and so corrupted because the CPP government does/did not provide poor Cambodian families and parents of the children with the accesses to health services, children cares, children educations, children welfare, and so on.
Children are our future of Khmer country.
Cont'd from 3:59PM
Those generous organizations of international communities should provide the booklets with full information to those poor Cambodian parents and families in Khmer languages along with the pictures or images of how to take care a good care of their families members and children in order to stay healthy and live happy.
Khmer Yeurng
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