The Civil Society-Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN) said it trained 290 Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Community-Based Organisations (CBOs), health workers and media on interventions to fight malnutrition in 2020.
Jayne Arinze-Egemonye, CS-SUNN Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, made this known during a Virtual Monitoring Meeting on Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement Pooled Fund Project-Window II on Friday.
Arinze-Egemonye said that the capacity of the CSOs, health workers and media was built to improve maternal and child health and nutrition through multisectoral nutrition interventions.
She said that the capacity of 140 CSOs, CBOs and media was built on Breast Milk Substitute Code, maternity protection, food fortification, and right to food.
According to her, 150 health workers and Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) were trained on Infant and Young Child Feeding practices, who equally stepped down the training to other health workers and TBAs.
She said that a total of 2,550 women and children under five years, benefited from project supported initiatives on nutrition through advocacy by CS-SUNN.
She also said that a Strategic Plan for Nigeria’s SUN Academia Network was developed and finalised to promote ownership and capacity strengthening of multi-sector and stakeholder platforms.
“The Pooled Fund grants is promoting the engagement of relevant actors in the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of multisectoral and multi-stakeholder national plans for nutrition.
“This is being achieved at the national and sub-national level.
“CS-SUNN will continue to work to scale up high-quality information and communication on nutrition behaviours and practices through targeted, multi-channel, and high-quality social and behavior change interventions.
“We will also continue to advocate and build capacity toward investment in a systems approach.
“This will help deliver services supporting nutrition through increasing community-based service delivery in the short term and improving the overall quality of health services over the long term,’’ she said.
Earlier, Medhanit Mekonnen, Monitoring and Quality Assurance Specialist – Africa Region, said that the SUN Movement Pooled Fund was a catalytic, last-resort source of small grants to support multi-stakeholder platforms in SUN countries.
Mekonnen said that the objective was to increase the effectiveness and impact of national efforts to end malnutrition in all its forms.
This, she said, was being achieved through the promotion of engagement of relevant actors in the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of multisectoral and multi-stakeholder national plans for nutrition.
The specialist commended CS-SUNN for the achievements recorded so far, stressing that sharing of knowledge, experience best practices among SUN countries would improve the impact of the project.
She said that the objective of the virtual meeting was to, among other things, assess progress with plans and ensure that activities and outputs were contributing to results.
“It was also organised to assess the extent to which grantees will be able to deliver all planned outputs and outcomes before the expiration of the grant agreement in June 2021.
“It will also provide recommendations and ways forward for the remaining project’s activities,” she added.
CS-SUNN Executive Secretary, Mrs Beatrice Eluaka, thanked partners for working together to eliminate nutrition in all its forms in the country. (NAN)
