NGO equip journalists to fight against children malnutrition

By Kingsley Chukwuka

Women Friendly Initiative (WFI), a non-governmental organisation has trained selected journalists to help address adolescents health issues and malnutrition among Nigerians.

WFI Chief Executive Officer, Dr Francis Eremutha told newsmen that the training was to boost journalists capacities to interrogate government policies relating to adolescents health services and nutritional plan.

Eremutha said that the training which took place November 7-9th in Abuja  was part of  Strengthening Civic Advocacy for Local Engagements in Nigeria (SCALE -Project) funded by USAID.

The chief executive said that the SCALE – Project was advocating for several policy implementation in Nigeria but WFI focus was on Adolescents and Youths Friendly Health Services (AYFHS) and National Strategic Plan of Action for Nutrition (NSPAN).

“That we are doing in several states up to the sub national level at the local government areas.

“Because of the kind of work we are doing, we have a feeling that one of the greatest tool that we must utilize in the course of our work is to carry journalists along.

“We believe journalists will help us tell the stories and magnify the challenges that we are addressing, as we promote the implementation of the policies across the states where we are working.

“The three-day workshop brought  selected journalists from Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, Kwara, Ebonyi and FCT to share with them, how those policies evolved, the expectations of those policies in terms of what they were supposed to achieve  and the level implementation in these states we are working.

“To see how we can advocate, to call government in place at both state and local government level and see how we can effectively develop Local Governmentd Areas (LGAs) we can call best  practice LGAs for those two policies”.

He expressed hope that in the next three years, when those policies have been implemented in those states, and those LGAs, those  LGAs would become the model that  could be shared across the country for others to learn from.

According to him, lessons learnt from implementing those policies would become the arguments for expansion and scale up across the country.

“The  adolescents who are from the age of 11 -19 are plagued with several challenges.

“In the past, we used to talk about adolescents as people who are just growing and have issues with developmental challenges.

“But  today, adolescents  are  graduates without jobs and others who entering  school at ages 11-12 years that ordinarily the parents should be guiding.

“But  now we have boarding schools everywhere and they are in boarding schools and they are looking at their pairs for direction.

“So, pair influence among adolescents has grown and today we have those who are into drugs and those are into commercial sex, those who are into cultism, those who are even into armed robbery so that they can carry big phones”.

Eremutha stated what WFI was trying to do was to engage the adolescence productively,  so that people would have time and spent more effort programming their  mind into what is gainfully developmental and positively enriching.

The CEO added that the initiative was also to take them away from the vices by promoting adolescents youth as an all around developemental tool that can bring them out of the crisis.

In the area of nutrition, Eremutha said that it was no secret that the herder/farmer clashes and the weather challenges and other challenges that come with food production and agriculture were limiting the availability of nutrients for Nigerians.

“So, nutrition has become a challenge across the board. From the pregnant woman to the breastfeeding mother to the zero to five year old child to even the adolscents,  almost everybody is malnourished in this country.

“We are promoting the nutritional policy that also allow home gardening to allow the use of what we have to get what we want within our communities,” he added.