Food self-sufficient Bangladesh now focusing on nutrition: Speaker

Speaker Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury has said Bangladesh is focusing on nutrition, now that it has become food self-sufficient.

She has urged organisations to make joint efforts to address malnutrition “comprehensively”.

Chaudhury was speaking at the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation-funded ‘Alive & Thrive’ initiative’s project evaluation report presentation function in Dhaka on Wednesday.

The six-year project ran from 2008 to 2014.

It aimed at saving lives, preventing illness, and contributing to healthy growth and development by scaling up interventions to improve infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia.

Of the three countries, Bangladesh has been the most successful.

Ellen Piwoz, senior programme officer on nutrition at the Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program, said they would fund a new phase for the next six years, based on the success of the first phase.

The new phase would focus on maternal nutrition, she said, and added that they would also take the Bangladesh lessons to the rest of the world.

According to the external evaluation report, the project succeeded in changing some hard-to-change dietary behaviours and food habits.

Timely initiation of breastfeeding rose to 94 percent from 46 percent, exclusive breastfeeding to 88 percent from 48 percent, and the introduction of semi-solid complementary foods rose to 99 percent from 46 percent to the intervention areas.

This contributed to a “significant” improvement in height and reduction of childhood illnesses.

The programme reached an estimated 8.5 million mothers of children under two years of age across Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh project model was unique in reaching the target people both through interpersonal counselling by trained frontline workers and the mass media.

The speaker thanked ‘Alive and Thrive’ for “successfully” completing the project and said it showed that behaviour change on mass scale was “possible”.

“People of Bangladesh are very receptive. If you give them the right kind of information, if they have the basic knowledge about what they need to do, if you create that awareness, they will just work and attain the goal,” she said

She said the project’s “community as well as media components” ensured it success.

Chaudhury pointed to Bangladesh’s progress in food security and said “now we are focusing on nutrition”.

“We have met the basic needs, and now we are creating greater awareness and trying to advocate and implement different programmes to meet nutrition.”

She, however, said nutrition was a “very comprehensive” issue; a gamut of aspects such as early marriage and maternal health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, and stunted growth were linked to malnutrition.

The speaker suggested that organisations working in this field combine their networks and use their resource pool to make interventions “cost-effective and easier”.

She also urged them to enter into “partnership” with the government and use state resources to reach out across Bangladesh.