Malnutrition in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA

http://www.brecorder.com

A two-day workshop on finalisation of strategy to combat malnutrition in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA was opened here on Wednesday. Besides representatives of almost all government organisations particularly health, education, food and agriculture departments from FATA and KP, country representatives of over 20 multi donor organisations like; WHO, Unicef and WFO are participating. The Additional Chief Secretary Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ataullah Khan was the chief guest at the opening ceremony. In his opening remarks, the Additional Chief Secretary expressed the hope that the workshop will help develop deeper engagements and better understanding of stakeholders to reach an agreement on specific roles to link policies and strategy development for implementation of a provincial integrated nutrition strategy. The ACS said that it was very disturbing that 48 percent of children in KP are under-weight because of suffering malnutrition both by the mother and child for a long time. However, the province has shown remarkable improvement in the rate of under-weight children which has been reduced to 24 percent in 2011 from 35 percent in 2001 but reducing it further a still a challenge for both the people and the government. On this occasion, representatives from World Food Programme, World Health Organisation, Unicef, Director General of Health Services Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and a number of experts of international repute delivered their papers on various aspects of malnutrition in the province and FATA, the experiences of different countries for combating it.