Giving a boost from the beginning
Helping pregnant women and nursing mothers in Burundi
The first 1,000 days — the time between conception and their second birthday — are a critical window of opportunity to give a child the best possible start in life for good nutrition for brain development and optimum physical growth.
In Burundi’s northern province of Kirundo, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Government of Burundi are helping parents give their children this essential boost by providing nutrition education, nutrition counselling and a monthly take home ration of specialized nutritious cereals, fortified with essential vitamins and minerals.
Healthy baby, happy mother
Tatine Mutarutwa understands the importance of a nursing mother to be on a healthy diet. Just before sunset every day, the 30-year-old mother lights her three-stone hearth, boils water in a cooking pot and adds the yellow cereal powder. After stirring it for about five minutes, the porridge is ready to eat.
“This is my main meal for the day,” she said with a smile. “I got it from the health centre. The nurse who gave it to me said it is good for me and my baby.”
Tatine is one of the 32,000 pregnant women and nursing mothers who have been enrolled in the nutrition programme in Kirundo province. This province is among the areas most affected by chronic malnutrition and food insecurity in the country according to the government-led Demographic and Health Survey (DHS, 2016–2017).
A few months ago, Tatine was admitted in the programme for treatment of moderate acute malnutrition. She was pregnant and had low weight. After three months of treatment she was discharged and transferred to another programme for the prevention of chronic malnutrition. Since then, she has been receiving Super Cereal Plus, a specialised nutritious food designed to fill the nutrient gap and prevent low birth weight and infections that lead to increased child mortality.
Tatine and her husband live on subsistence farming growing corn, beans and sweet potatoes. For the last year, their crops have failed due to the drought in the area. Their total annual harvest is not even enough to meet their food needs for a month.
Like many families, Tatine and her husband had no choice but to try and find work elsewhere, on average earning 1200 Burundi Franc a day (less than 50 US cents) — a revenue that falls short of providing even one nutritious meal a day.
WFP’s nutrition programme has been a lifeline for Tatine and her baby and she could not imagine how they would have survived without it.
“The first time I visited the health centre, I weighed only 37 kg. I was given this special food in order to gain weight. Now, you can see it by yourself, I weigh more than 47 kg and my baby looks healthy because I can feed her exclusively on breast milk” she said.
A Small Investment with a Large Reward
WFP is able to undertake this crucial nutrition programme thanks to financial contributions from the Governments of Germany and Japan, and implementation is done in partnership with the Ministry of Public Health and the Non-Governmental Organization Concern Worldwide. WFP also supports community nutrition education where women teach other women dietary diversity, exclusive breast feeding, hygiene practices and family planning.
Tatine said she has learnt a lot from the community training including when to exclusively provide breast milk to a child and how to ensure dietary diversity by integrating the different food groups into the daily food preparation for a family.
“I am ready to share my own experience with other women in my community. This will help raise their awareness on the value of having a nutritious diet for the healthy growth of our children” she said.
