A 70-year-old chief promotes exclusive breastfeeding through festivals
Traditionally, festivals are events ordinarily celebrated by a community for their cultural and religious significance. Festivals are therefore seen as a very important event in many Ghanaian societies.
However, a divisional chief in the Kasena Nankana West District in the Upper East Region is not only marking festival for its cultural or religious importance but using his community's festival to champion the promotion of exclusive breastfeeding and birth registration.
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The chief, Thomas Alua, a Divisional Chief of the Kazigu Community, uses their local festival, dubbed: “Won dai Abu” which means “Who is not my child” to encourage mothers with newborn babies and expectant mothers to exclusively breastfeed their babies and also take birth registration seriously.
The chief, whose personal experience and advocacy has motivated a number of parents, particularly those with newborn babies to practice exclusive breastfeeding, believes that it was only through education and awareness creation that could help change some old practices that affect human development.
Exclusive breastfeeding
Research shows that newborns account for nearly half of all deaths of children under five and that early breastfeeding can make the difference between life and death.
According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), delayed breastfeeding increases risk of newborn deaths by up to 80 per cent. It reports further that about 500 thousand newborns in Ghana are not breastfed within first hour of life.
Article published on UNICEF portal on August 2, 2016, quoted France Bégin, UNICEF Senior Nutrition Adviser of having said that “If all babies are fed nothing but breastmilk from the moment they are born until they are six months old, over 800,000 lives would be saved every year worldwide.”
According to Bégin, “Breastmilk is a baby’s first vaccine, the first and best protection they have against illness and disease.”
The Ghana Demographic and Health Survey 2014 indicates that almost half of Ghanaian babies are not breastfed within one hour of birth. In Ghana, for instance, only 52 per cent of infants under six months old are exclusively breastfed.
Experts say that babies who are not breastfed at all are 14 times more likely to die than those who are fed only breastmilk.
The World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated annually from 1-7th August in over 170 countries to promote breastfeeding and improve infant nutrition around the world.
The UNICEF Ghana Representative, Susan Namondo Ngongi, for instance, believes that “ensuring every Newborn is optimally breastfed is a responsibility not only for the mother, but for society as a whole" and that "successful practice of breastfeeding requires skilled instruction, a supportive environment and time".
Chief's motivation
The 70-year-old chief, who said he was denied exclusive breastfeeding by his parents some seven decades ago believes that children who are not exclusively breastfed for at least, six-months, have been abused of their fundamental human rights.
“When I was born, my parents didn’t know about the importance of exclusive breastfeeding and used to give me water, sometimes through my nostrils, this later affected my sense of smell and subsequently my ability to purse Science in Secondary School as I could not perform experiments in laboratory that require the use of the sense of smell”, he shared his experience at a durbar.
Importance of EBF
Chief Thomas Alua explained that children who are breastfed exclusively for a minimum of six-months have better cognitive abilities over those who are not exclusively breastfed.
He has, therefore, urged grandparents and in-laws to support their in-laws to champion exclusive breastfeeding in their respective households.
The chief’s open declaration and advocacy of exclusive breastfeeding in his community have contributed to increase in the practice in his area and its environs.
Similarly, many parents are also registering their newborn babies at birth registration centres while others are taking steps to register their older children.
Chief Thomas Alua expressed the worry that because many parents did not take birth registration seriously, many children “are carrying wrong dates of birth because they have to concoct one for themselves”.
Happy
The Executive Director of the Rural Initiatives and Self-Empowerment-Ghana (RISE-Ghana), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Mr Awal Ahmed
He said in the local communities, traditional leaders wield a lot of power and so if such leaders become champions and advocates of health initiatives, it helps to reach the people easily with the right information.
“When they (chiefs and opinion leaders in the community) publicly speak against something or endorse a practice, it carries a lot of weight and goes a long way to affect the process either negatively or positively,” he said.
Mr Kariama said even though trends in childhood mortality in Ghana has declined, more lives would be saved if the rate of early initiation of breastfeeding is improved.
He said for instance that exclusive breastfeeding forms an integral part of the Mother and Baby Friendly Health Facility Initiative (MBFHI) project, which is the Ghana national newborn strategy and action plan.
MBFHI
The MBFHI outlined in the Ghana national newborn strategy and action plan is to ensure the provision of respectful, courteous, and supportive facility-based care for every mother and every baby, including promotion of early and exclusive breastfeeding.
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