Banjul, 06th March 2025: The National Nutrition Agency (NaNA), mandated by law to coordinate nutrition and all nutrition-related matters in this country, under the Office of the Vice President, has been championing the fight against malnutrition and promoting government nutrition enhancement policies and programmes .
In an interview with Mr Adu Aziz Ceesay, Director of Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC) highlighted the progress and prospects in their work on nutrition and healthy feeding.
“Nutrition is not only about the availability of fruit and nutritious food in the diet of people. It involves agriculture, food security, fishery, health, education and so on” he stated.
He went on: “One of the indicators of malnutrition is stunting, which is one of the chronic form of malnutrition. Stunting affects growth either in weight or height”.
He mentioned anemia as a consequent of malnutrition. He however said it has been in the decline since 2019, from 66% to now 45%, due to the intervention of NaNA. He also said the rate of stunting has been on the decline since 2019 from about 25% to now 17.8%.
On their interventions, Mr Ceesay mentioned the food fortification programme, which involves adding some micronutrients to food vehicles. “We add potassium iodine to salt as a strategy to get the micronutrient to the population. We have a regulation that makes it mandatory to fortify three food vehicles, which are salt, wheat flour and vegetable oil”.
On the challenges, Mr Ceesay mentioned lack of resources as major challenge for them. He however lauded partners like World Bank, ECOWAS, and FAO for their support.
By Jalika Keita & Isatou Camara
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