Local activists have called for more efforts towards sensitizing mothers about modern breastfeeding techniques. Every first week of August, the world celebrates breastfeeding, the week aims to highlight the huge benefits that breastfeeding can bring to both the health and welfare of babies and mothers. This years edition of the week was held under the theme: Protecting breastfeeding: A shared responsibility. Speaking about the current situation of breastfeeding in the country, different activists who were interviewed by The New Times cited challenges are facing the practice, as they called for modern ways to address them. According to Sylvie Nsanga, a Social Justice Advocate, due to lack of comfortable places, some mothers - for example, those of working-class, tend to stop breastfeeding their children at an early age. We can’t call upon mothers to breastfeed responsibly ignoring the challenges they face, she said. Here, she urged that policymakers to work hand-in-hand with employers to ensure that comfortable places are reserved in working places such that mothers can breastfeed their children without compromising on their work output. In addition to this, she suggested the use of modern techniques such as the breast pump, especially for working mothers. A breast pump can still be a solution to working-class mothers. But they need room to pump the milk and store it for their babies, she said, adding that such modern breastfeeding tips for safe breastfeeding should be taught to mothers. According to experts, breastfeeding is said to be the best source of infant nutrition, a robust diet that is easy for the baby to digest. In addition to containing all the vitamins and nutrients that babies need in the first six months of their lives, breast milk is packaged with disease-fighting substances that protect them from illness. In Rwanda, the percentage of exclusively breastfed infants decreases from 94 per cent among infants aged 0 to 1 month to 81 per cent among those aged 4 to 5 months. Gilbert Munyemana, the Acting Director-General of the National Child Development Agency (NCDA) says that employers should give women longer maternity leave, and create for them safe places for breastfeeding at the workplace. He says one of the challenges that breastfeeding mothers face is related to the lack of time to go home and breastfeed. Here, the proposed solution in that regard is the establishment of Early Childhood Development Centres settings at the workplace or breastfeeding rooms for mothers to breastfeed or pump milk for their babies. Learning from the Covid-19 situation, Munyemana says they are examining the idea of fronting the option of having breastfeeding mothers work from home for at least three months after their maternity leave. Mothers can be facilitated to exclusively breastfeed their children for 6 months, he said. He further argued that, in the same line of thinking, fathers could also be considered for the work-from-home scheme so that they can support their wives in caring for their children in the first months of their life.
