There is a need to change focus and fix it on women that are preparing to join motherhood to reduce the number of babies stunted born when they are already stunted, the Coordinator of the National Early Childhood Development Programme, Dr. Anita Asiimwe has said.

She said this at the ongoing three-day high-level workshop aimed at strengthening the capacity of parliamentarians to review and track national resources allocated to programmes fighting malnutrition among children and women.

Asiimwe said that the fact that children are currently being born when they are already stunted is something that is raising concerns within the government and its health partners.

According to the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, the percentage of stunted children under the age of five dropped from 38 per cent to 33 per cent in the last five years.

She pointed out that to fix this, a time has come to redirect efforts into preparing women that are preparing to be mothers to feed better and prepare for healthier babies.

"We must focus on women before they become parents. In our plans, we must prepare early so that by the time she is pregnant and finally giving birth, she should be healthy. Then we will move on to when she is pregnant and ensure that she eats a balanced diet,” she said.

Proper feeding knowledge

Asiimwe pointed out that although there has been an improvement in proper feeding of children below two (increased from 18 per cent in 2015 to the current 22), the is need to add efforts in disseminating the right information regarding

She reminded that proper feeding means the number of times a child is fed and the contents of that meal.

"The solution to this issue can be found in the information that a parent has regarding proper nutrition and the time she or he spends on their children. There is also a challenge where parents are not fully conversant with the idea of a balanced diet,” she said.

She called for more focus to be put into encouraging families to start ‘Kitchen Gardens’ which she said can play a significant role in improving diets.

"We have found some areas where the issue is not lack of food but understanding how to prepare the food that they have. In places where there is a ‘Kitchen Garden’, children suffering from acute malnutrition and wasting, in 12 days, there is a big improvement in the child’s progress,” she said.

Senator Marie-Rose Mureshyankwano told her colleagues that there is a need to thoroughly break down the numbers so that all the concerned parties have a clear picture of the depth of the stunting issue.

"We have the percentages but I think we need to know the small details involved in these numbers. When we are doing fieldwork, we find that local authorities don’t even know how to quantify stunting,” she said.

She also agreed that approaching the stunting issue from another angle could help the stakeholders to get faster and sustainable solutions.

"My opinion is that we should look at stunting from another angle. We can start from way before the child is born, how we prepare the mother, how to also prepare the mother not to give birth to a number of children that is beyond her abilities, how to feed her child and how to follow-up this child and the mother,” she said.

Last week, at the ceremony to officially release the findings of the Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey, the Minister of Health Dr. Daniel Ngamije said that 1 per cent of children were wasted in 2020 compared to 2 per cent in 2015.

Wasting is a measure of acute under-nutrition, which may result from inadequate food intake or from a recent episode of illness-causing weight loss, according to health experts.

The rate of underweight children (too-thin for their age) reduced slightly from 9 per cent to 8 per cent in the same period.