Kaduna State has emerged the ‘Best Performing State’ in the World Bank-supported Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria (ANRiN) project out of the 11 states assessed for the project’s Community-Based Nutrition Service Delivery.
The project manager, ANRiN Kaduna State, Dr Zainab Muhammad-Idris made the disclosure yesterday while presenting the 8 awards won by the state to commissioners for health and budget and planning commission.
The ANRIN project is a three-year project funded by the World Bank to increase access to and utilization of quality, cost-effective nutrition services among pregnant and lactating women, adolescent girls, and children under five years of age in Kaduna State.
The project manager explained that Kaduna came first as the Best Performing State: Most Innovative State, Best Performing State: Safeguards, Best Performing State: Social Behaviour Communication, Best Performing State: Partner Mapping and Coordination (DLI) and second position in Best Performing State: SPHCDA and Best Performing State: Fiduciary at the sixth ANRiN event held in Abuja.
“We are here to present the awards won by Kaduna State under the ANRiN project to Commissioners and their teams and we believe that these are the two principal ministries that have continued to support the project implementation unit.
“We carried everyone along to ensure we deliver our services to non-state actors, basic services of nutrition and other health services to the target beneficiaries that comprises pregnant women, lactating mothers, adolescent girls and children less than 5 years of age across the 23 LGAs in Kaduna State”.
Muhammad-Idris also disclosed that the project has reached out to over 2 million beneficiaries with the services, saying that the services consist of maternal infant and young child nutrition counselling, the delivery of micro nutrient powder supplement to children between the ages of six months to 59 months and other services.
“Our target is to see how we can cover the entire 23 LGAs, where we have over 8 million beneficiaries to benefit from this project,” she said.
The commissioner for health, Dr Amina Mohammed-Baloni commended ANRiN, saying that it is a testimony to the hard work and urged the team to do more.
The commissioner for budget and planning, Hajia Umma Yusuf Aboki said, “we thank ANRiN for the good work and hope that the citizens of Kaduna State will see what we are doing to improve health.
“We have continued to prioritize the health sector, as a state we have continued to provide 15 percent of our annual budget to health. We are trying to ensure that there is access to health to every citizen of Kaduna.”
