WFP launches nutrition enhancement programme
Nutrition is important to the physical and mental development of children.
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A healthy child grows into a healthy adult, and good nutrition is essential to good human health from gestation through infancy to young childhood and adulthood, research having established that the optimal dietary energy, protein and mineral intakes are necessary for maternal health during pregnancy and lactation, as well as for the wellbeing of infants and children.
In line with efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition among children and deal with the issue of stunted growth in parts of the country, particularly in the three regions of the northern parts of the country, the World Food Programme (WFP) has launched a new programme dubbed Enhanced Nutrition and Value Chain in Ghana (ENVAC).
Sponsored by Global Affairs, formerly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) of the Canadian Government, at a cost of $15 million, the project will run for five years (2016-2020) and will build on the successes chalked up by the Purchase for Progress (P4P) programme which ended this year.
Launch
At the launch of the project, the Deputy Country Director of WFP, Ms Magdalena Owusu Moshi, said the ENVAC project was an integrated nutrition and food security programme built on the P4P Initiative and other WFP interventions using food-based approaches to improve nutrition.
She said the project had been formulated to tackle nutrition challenges through a market based value chain which linked smallholder or low income farmers to local food manufacturers.
Although Ghana had been largely successful in improving nutrition, she said, a lot of work still remained to be done.
"Stunting across the country has reduced to 19 per cent, but in the Northern Region one in three children is stunted. Anaemia and other micronutrient deficiencies continue to affect high percentages of children and women with dire consequences,” she said.
She said a successful ENVAC would provide a model which could be replicated by government and other development partners to achieve zero hunger nationwide.
She was grateful to the Canadian Government for investing in improving nutrition, food security, education and livelihoods of vulnerable food insecure people in Ghana over the past decades.
“Thank you for enabling WFP to serve more food insecure people time and again,” she stated.
Beneficiaries
The Country Coordinator for the ENVAC project, Mr Nanga Kaye, said about 10,000 small-holder farmers and their families were expected to benefit from the project.
He said throughout its life-cycle, the project would target two industrial food processors, 30 community level small-scale food processors and two community level small-scale maize and staple foods flour processors.
According to him, the project will create market for maize, millet, cowpeas and soybeans farmers and secondary market for cassava flour, yam flour and orange flesh sweet potato producers.
The regions to benefit from the project are the Upper West, Upper East, Northern, Ashanti and the Brong Ahafo regions.