2 months ago
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The United Nations Children’s Fund, on Wednesday, handed over 7,000 cartons of ready-to-use therapeutic foods to the Katsina State government, to fight malnutrition in the state.
Speaking during the handover, the UNICEF Nigeria Country Representative, Ms Cristian Mundiate, described the RUTF as life-saving to malnourished children.
“With this initiative, we hope to save as many lives as possible, not only in Katsina State but Nigeria at large,” she said.
Mundiate said UNICEF was committed to the fight against the scourge of malnutrition in the country.
She added that the organisation was willing to provide additional funding for the project if the government gave more financial allocation to the health sector and built more primary healthcare centres across the communities.
“It is important to know that we need to take care of our young ones and children under five years. We stood here with the Katsina State Governor and we both joined in putting in the same amount of funds each, N200m and we brought 7,000 cartons of UKS.
“These are life-saving supplements to those children that are severely acute, malnourished children we have in Nigeria and with this, we can help save as many lives as possible.
“We will cover 7,000 children, but we also bring 1,400 nutritional supplements for those children who have not yet reached that stage but are already malnourished and what we want to do is to prevent them from falling into that dangerous stage of complications.
“We call on all communities, families, parents to take care of their children and if anyone notices a child is getting thin, take him to the health facilities, because we can’t afford to lose children’s lives,” she added.
The UNICEF chief congratulated the Katsina State government and hoped that the government could double the amount and ensure more communities have primary health care.
Receiving the supplements, Governor Dikko Radda acknowledged what he described as a high number of malnourished children in the state.
“There is a need because we have a high number of malnourished children in all the country. These are to address the problem.
“Today, we launched the food supplements. About 8,000 children will benefit from this gesture and we will continue to do this partnership and provide supplements to our children.
“This is part of our obligations to ensure that we have healthy children from the age of zero to five. Together with UNICEF, we contributed N400m to achieve this,” Radda said.
