Stakeholders Advocate Exclusive Breastfeeding

As Nigeria joined the rest of the world to commemorate the World Breastfeeding Week, stakeholders have advocated for optimal and exclusive breastfeeding while encouraging employers to provide enabling environment for breastfeeding mothers.

The director, micronutrient deficiency control, Federal Ministry of Health, Chief Uruakpa John, who spoke during a road walk campaign to promote exclusive breastfeeding, as part of activities to mark this year’s World Breast Feeding Week, themed: ‘Enabling Breastfeeding, Making a Difference for Working Parents’, in Abuja, said breastfeeding is essential for proper development of a child.

He said exclusive breastfeeding helps to build the immunity of a child against childhood diseases as it equips the child with all the necessary antibodies required for proper growth and development.

Also speaking at the event, a representative of Breakthrough ACTION Nigeria, Angela Samba,
said the goal of the organisation’s project is to increase practice of priority health and nutrition behaviour which breastfeeding is one of them.

She said “We want to increase the practice of this behaviours through some of the effort that we put in, working with communities and then government partners and alot of other partners to ensure that people know about this practices and are able to adopt it.

“This years world breastfeeding week it focuses on the work place because the work place has a very significant role to play in ensuring that mothers are able to breastfeed effectively.

“In Nigeria, a lot of mothers breastfeed yet our stunting rate is very high and the reason is that even though they breastfeed, they don’t breastfeed appropriately and so we want to promote optimal breastfeeding.”

Samba said optimal breastfeeding is early stage of breastfeeding; starting breastfeeding within the first hours of birth, while exclusive breastfeeding is feeding only breast milk for the first six months of life and then giving nutritious appropriate complementary feeding, addition to breast milk from six months to at least two years.

“We want the work place to consider this things in developing specific breastfeeding space in the work place to enable mothers to breastfeed in the work place because a lot of the population of women we have are working mothers and so and if the work place is not conducive for them, it means that they will not be able to practice the nutritious behaviours that we are promoting,” she added.