FG Trains Nutrition Officers On Accountability, Effective Distribution, Data

The Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, in collaboration with Nutrition International, has trained 30 nutrition and logistics officers on effective strategies for commodity distribution, logistics, and data collection.

The two-day training, which ends on Tuesday, is focused on nutrition commodities logistics onboarding into the Nigerian Health Logistic Management Information System (NHLMIS) at the state level.

The director of the Nutrition Department of the ministry, Mrs Ladidi Bako, said the training is conducted in the country, with Kano being the ninth.

Representative of the assistant chief scientific officer of the ministry, Iperepolu Odunayo said while the department coordinates nutrition response in the health sector it also defines standards, issues guidelines to assist the states and the local government areas with planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating nutrition programmes.

“The success of the nutrition program is to ensure reliable and timely delivery of nutrition commodities throughout the country especially reaching the vulnerable population.

“As part of this plan, a nutrition commodity logistic management system is expected to be fully developed and implemented identifying routine schedules between nutrition commodity and efficient delivery mechanisms that will really stock out all health facilities and community distribution points.

“The objective is to raise a pool of nutrition logistic managers that will cascade the training to other officers in the local government areas of Kano State on the use of Nigeria health logistic management information system. For accountability of nutrition commodities and also for the government and partners to have visibility on nutrition commodities in all states of the federation,” Odunayo said.

On her part, the Kano State coordinator, Nutrition International, Victoria Agommuo highlighted that the essence is to ensure that women and children get the right vitamins they need to survive and live a productive life.

“We are partnering with the FG on this training because we want to have a pool of trainers, equip them with the knowledge and skills for nutrition commodities and accountability as well as how to compile nutrition data because nutrition commodities are coming into the country to ensure accountability because they are expensive,” she said.