Although extreme poverty is a major contributor to the number of children that continue to suffer from stunting, there is need to disseminate more information to the masses whose knowledge and attitude towards proper feeding is still low, Members of Parliament heard on Monday, December 7.

Although the percentage of children under the age of five that are suffering malnutrition dropped from 38 per cent to 33 per cent in the last five years, the government with its development partners continue to boost efforts to ensure that the number drops to at least 19 percent by 2024.

In a three-day high-level parliamentarians workshop to analyse nutrition budgeting that kicked off on Monday at the Kigali Convention Centre, MP Omar Munyaneza said that there is still a widespread misconception that stunting is only caused by poverty yet some districts that have performed well via reducing poverty levels are still struggling with stunting.

"There are districts that have an abundance of food, that are developed like Nyabihu but they do not know how to balance the diet. It is our role as MPs to heighten sensitisation programs and to take them down to the grassroots level where we should continue sensitising the masses about the value of proper feeding,” he said.

Use your influence

The UNICEF Country Representative Julianna Lindsey called on the parliamentarians to continue engaging stakeholders in the fight against malnutrition by publicly debating and advocating for nutrition within the national development agenda.

"You can use your influence and voice to advocate for more action, greater accountability, and increased budget to nutrition programmes. In the context of Covid19, your voices and influence will help to ensure priority sectors for children like nutrition maintain a high priority on the development agenda," she said.  

The Principal Senior Training Coordinator at the Rwanda Management Institute Fidele Abimana told the parliamentarians that as part of their training programs, it had been discovered that a number of Rwandans did not fully understand what entails proper nutrition and its connection to fighting malnutrition.  

"The understanding of the issue is still low as we have discovered in several training programs we have had all over the country but we hope that by the end of this workshop, we will have come up with an action plan on the way forward,” he said.

Last week, at the ceremony to officially release the findings of the Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey, the Minister of Health Dr. Daniel Ngamije said that 1 per cent of children were wasted in 2020 compared to 2 per cent in 2015.

Wasting is a measure of acute under-nutrition, which may result from inadequate food intake or from a recent episode of illness-causing weight loss, according to health experts.

The rate of underweight children (too-thin for their age) reduced slightly from 9 per cent to 8 per cent in the same period.