In Uganda's agriculture and nutrition work, child nutrition is being given the highest priority. Changes have been made to children's food, and with advice and support from donor agencies and development organisations, good results are being achieved in improving children's nutrition.

In Uganda in East Africa, food means simply filling the stomach somehow; there is little thought about nutrition. When the world counts 200 crore people suffering hidden hunger, Ugandans make up a large share of them.

Children, too, lagged behind in nutrition. Then people's eyes seemed suddenly opened when they got hold of orange-fleshed sweet potato. Farm women themselves invented a highly nutritious baby food by mixing iron beans and sweet potato powder with milk.

Records of the improvement in children's health from using this food are then kept at village gatherings. A development worker said: "Look, this child weighed 9.7 kg in the first month. Exactly one month later the weight rose from 9.7 kg to 10.5 kg."

But the next month the weight unexpectedly fell. The reason, they said, was that the child's mother was ill; she could not care for the child properly, so the steady progress was interrupted and the weight dropped.

This success has come through the BRAC Uganda agriculture and nutrition project, and it has spread to many lagging areas of the country.

Sharmin Sharif, health manager at BRAC Uganda, said: "What can we do so that our children stay well? Nutrition, of course: what to feed them, and then how to feed them. These things are demonstrated here."

Md Hannan Ali, programme manager of BRAC Uganda, said: "We work this way from the health angle in four districts. But our main focus is agriculture, and then we think about the others." The World Bank is also optimistic about this nutrition work.

Source: Shykh Seraj. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.