Governments should take serious action against malnutrition to reduce the rate at which the vice is claiming lives of children, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned. Dr Delanyo Dovlo, the WHO country representative, said on Thursday that the rate at which children under five years are suffering from chronic malnutrition needs immediate action. He made the remarks during an event in Kigali to mark the annual World Environment Day that was marked this week under the theme “Think.Eat.Save”. “Although the rate at which children are being affected by malnutrition in Rwanda has been gradually reducing, there is still need to put in more efforts to ensure that children do not loose lives to malnutrition,” Dovlo said. He explained that parents need to understand that great feeding of their children remains one of the best ways to protect them against diseases. WHO says that malnutrition is one of the leading causes of death among children under five, with hidden or unreported malnutrition contributing to more than half of child deaths. Dovlo called on countries, especially developing countries, to embrace WHO’s programme that aims at Zero Hunger as one of the available mechanisms to fight against child malnutrition. A study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) in 2011 revealed that about a third of the entire world’s food, about 1.3 billion tons, gets wasted in the food production and consumption processes. The Country Director of World Food Programme, Jan Belbaere, called for setting up training programmes to build the capacity and knowledge of people on what a healthy meal should be to enable parents to appropriately feed their children. “You find that sometimes food is available but the information about what children require as good and rich nutrition food may be lacking,” he said. The Director General of Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA), Rose Mukankomeje, warned parents who take the good yields to the market for sale, leaving their families with almost nothing to eat.
