News Editor
As Nigeria joins the rest of the world to commemorate the 2021 World Breastfeeding Week and as part of efforts to contribute to improving Nigeria’s Exclusive Breast Feeding (EBF) rates, the Civil Society-Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN) in collaboration with Save the Children International has launched a public call on the necessity for exclusive breastfeeding among women and nursing mothers.
The Executive Secretary of CS-SUNN Mrs Beatrice Eluaka during her welcome remark at a one-day strategic meeting organized by the civil society with the theme “Women Leaders as Change Agents for Exclusive Breastfeeding in Nigeria”, stated that breastfeeding is beneficial not only to the mother and child, but to the entire community and that everyone has a responsibility.
Eluaka further called on the government to initiate family-friendly policies to ensure exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of birth and continue even after the six months with other nutritional food for the next two years of the child’s growth.
She made a similar call to the Workplaces and employers of labour, to help support mothers who are giving their time and energy to work and development, to breastfeed their babies well, by making the work-places conducive for breastfeeding and appealed that the six months maternity leave period they had proposed for years now, should be implemented at workplaces to enhance proper and comfortable breastfeeding.
Eluaka also called on the fathers and husbands to ensure that their wives feed well and give them proper care and attention, by making deliberate efforts to make the wife stress free especially while nursing the baby, as this will allow breastfeeding to work better.
The strategic meeting was designed to bring together Religious, Traditional, Civil Society and Professional Women groups and bodies to engage on breastfeeding issues and make commitments towards improved EBF in Nigeria, and to disseminate key religious messages on Maternal Infant and Young Child Feeding.
Mrs Beatrice in an exclusive chat with TMS News correspondent on the sidelines, disclose that the CS-SUNN is making efforts in reaching out to women in the rural centers, security, and insurgent threatening areas and even women in the IDP Camps to ensure that the message not only gets to them, but also, the action is taken appropriately. She called on all and sundry to help support this course because the healthy development of a child is very essential to the growth of any nation.
