Lagos State Nutrition Programme

If health is said to be wealth, then Governor Fashola is on a mission to make Lagos State mega wealthy. One of his efforts is ensuring proper nutrition for citizens of the state because a well-fed community is much more productive in all spheres than a malnourished one.
The programme’s goal is to initiate, develop and implement policies, concepts, strategies and plans to meet the nutritional needs of the State’s citizenry, particularly the most vulnerable members’ of the society such as children and older people.

Lagos State actively promotes appropriate maternal nutrition practices, nutrition education for the nursing mother, and advocates increased commitment of policy makers and other relevant stakeholders on the centrality of nutrition to health and development. The State government has also sustained implementation of school milk programme from 2003 till date.

The income level of most parents in Nigeria keeps millions of children out of school in spite of the 1999 launch of the Universal Basic Education (UBE) and the enactment of the UBE Act in 2004 aimed at achieving the United Nations Millennium Development goals of Education for All (EFA) by 2015.
Lagos State is making a valiant effort to meet these goals, by launching the school-feeding programme with a view to attracting more children to school. As part of this effort, the state has been distributing 'Cowbell' milk to pupils every Tuesday and Thursday and the children are always looking forward to those two days to come to school.

The provision of milk has boosted pupils' enrolment along with the state’s collaboration effort with some philanthropists to provide free meals for pupils under the "Adopt-A-School programme". As a way of confirming its efficacy, a study was carried out to determine the effect of School Feeding Programme (SFP) on primary school children attendance in Epe Local government Area (LGA) of Lagos. Information was collected from 220 school pupils in the state and the test revealed that the school-feeding programme [SFP] succeeded in increasing parent’s net income.

The result of the test of structural difference in the two samples taken using the chow test revealed that SFP improves attendance of children in school and that there was significant difference in attendance of children in class with and without SFP.
Whilst the school milk and school feeding programmes take care of the school age children, the state launched other programmes aimed at the nutritional health of the other age groups. For infants, the State actively promotes exclusive breastfeeding, including supervision in designated baby friendly health facilities.

This is part of the nutrition programme started on Mar 17th 2010 and which will be sustained into the future. Some of the other actions to be taken include distribution of vitamin A, Iron and folic acid tablets and salt testing kits to mothers and children in all the LGAs of the State; establishment of an inter-ministerial State Committee on Food and Nutrition (SCFN); training of health workers, teachers and mothers on essential nutrition package, dietary diversification and growth monitoring; collaboration between and within different sectors and networking among principal partners in nutrition in health program for technical assistance and sustainable financing.

Though there have been several initiatives on the benefits of nutrition both at the state and federal levels, Governor Fashola has gone one step further by putting the efforts under one programme so that the monitoring and coordination can be more effective and statistics will be more available when required for effective decision making.

Good move,