Executive Director of Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, has tasked newly sworn-in State Governors to own the fight against acute malnutrition currently ravaging children in parts of the country.
He said the call has become necessary considering the fact that many international donor organizations have started withdrawing from funding many programmes in the country adding that before now, many State Governments do little or nothing concerning the issue, thus leaving everything to the donor agencies.
He spoke through Ms Lovelyn Agbor-Gabriel, CISLAC’s SAM project Coordinator/Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at the opening of a one day Wider CSO Groups Engagement on the Prevention and Treatment of Severe Acute Malnutrition as a Child Right Issue in Gombe State .
Mr. Rafsanjani, who stressed that malnutrition is still a very big issue in Nigeria considering that about 65 children die as a result of acute malnutrition every hour, said treatment and prevention of malnutrition in children must be treated as fundamental human rights of the children.
“Many State Governments don’t have matching funds, and donor organizations have started going, so, we have to make State Governments to own these programmes aimed at fighting malnutrition”, he stressed.
To the Civil Society Organizations, he said, “We therefore need to engage our Governments to be accountable and know that treatment and prevention of malnutrition should be made a fundamental human right of children.
The Programme officer of CISLAC, Mohammed Murtala, said State Governments should be able to procure at least seventy (70) per cent of the Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) used in reviving acutely malnourished children which is now produced in Nigeria.
Gombe State had produced a well documented state policy on malnutrition since 2016, but unfortunately, it has not been implemented since then.
