The United Kingdom and the United Nations Children Fund
(UNICEF) have tackled malnutrition in 233,000 children in the troubled North-east
Nigeria, it was learnt.
The sponsorship for this intervention, which stood
at $10 million, is through the Department for International Development (DFID),
the United Kingdom department responsible for administering overseas aids, and
covered October 2018 to May 2019.
As a result of the success of the initial project
managed by UNICEF, DFID in April 2019 approved a £22 million multi-sectoral
intervention of malnutrition in the Northeast for another three years.
The intervention, which spans April 2019 to March
2022, targets 87,000 persons with a comprehensive treatment of malnutrition.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday in Maiduguri, Borno
State capital, Nutrition Manager of UNICEF, Sanjay Das, said the intervention
has yielded immense success as drugs and nutrition compliments are now
available to tackle malnutrition through funding from DFID.
He, however, lamented that the intervention has faced
some challenges, including insecurity which made project areas inaccessible.
Das also noted that the medical team has not been able to access some areas in the state in the rainy season due to flooding and
because some parts of the town have a scattered population and difficult to bring
together under one medical facility.
When journalists visited one of the internally
displaced persons (IDPs) camps, Bakasi, housing 39,176, it was learnt that 105
new cases were attended to last week.
A Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM)
Provider at the camp, Ibrahim Shaibu, said they also attended to patients from
the host community.
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