Early Childhood in Horn of Africa - Integrating Psychosocial Support into Nutrition Interventions

leena_rammah@hotmail.com Aug 19, 2011

For the first question, food aid and cash support is essential in such cases for everybody with giving priority for providing food for children, pregnant and lactating mothers as a purpose of child survival and maternal health. I am sure by now there must be a humanitarian immediate response in many affected areas coordinated between national authorities and WFP, etc… , therefore, I don’t think it is sufficient now to give cash support and food aid for affected families of drought and food shortage in HoA. Nutrition can be given as incentives to mothers/ caregivers/ social mobilizers besides training them to assure getting information on psychosocial support and training them on using ECD kit. Linkages has to be coordinated between nutrition and ECD and it can take a special mechanism like using feeding centers as raising awareness for the caregivers about the importance of nutrition in the brain development and how poor maternal and child malnutrition can be a cause for structural damage of the brain and cognitive development and how malnutrition can have bad effects not only on the short terms but on long term and how it can reduce intellectual performance, attendance school enrollment, lower IQ ability, slower language and fine motor development.

For the second question, in my opinion, it is a suitable time especially the immediate humanitarian response was made already in many affected areas and there was some work done since the start of HoA famine occurred. As mentioned above the nutrition incentives can be given as an advantage to provide information in tents, child Friendly spaces and feeding centers on the importance of stimulation and how the combination of a good nutrition and stimulation can make a lot of differences in the brain development of the child.
In addition to advocate among pregnant and lactating mothers for exclusive breastfeeding Breast milk contains all the amino and fatty acids needed for brain development and then introducing micronutrients in later stage. The best coordination will be if health, nutrition and ECD interventions can be linked in such cases. In addition, we can link ECD to communication/C4D for a sustainability point of view.