Siquijor Province - According to the World Health Organization, undernutrition has been a serious condition in the Philippines for decades. It costs the Philippine economy US$ 4.4 billion or 1.5% of GDP every year. The global and social-economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has made things worse causing food insecurity to rise sharply to the highest level due to high market prices, affordability of nutritious food affecting poverty.

The burden of malnutrition is a major barrier to development which highlights the underlying basic causes in which food often the first issue that comes to mind when addressing nutrition. Poor feeding practices of infants and young children due to lack of knowledge, unavailability, or unaffordability of nutritious food are factors contributing to malnutrition. Frequent childhood illness due to limited access of preventive and curative health services and insufficient access to health, sanitation and clean water services and poor access to safe water will also contribute to malnutrition. 

We need to act now to protect many children as possible from the long-term impacts of chronic malnutrition. The Philippines can bring malnutrition levels down through a strong commitment to build closely by coordinating partnerships between national and local government units and provide the level of financing to implement large scale nutrition interventions and address the multifaceted causes of undernutrition.

To reduce malnutrition, we need to invest and integrate nutrition-sensitive programs. This has a huge impact to embed nutrition related issues and requires a systemic and holistic approach ensuring improvements in planning, implementation, and evaluation of our development work. Agriculture and food security, education, and social welfare programs, are nutrition-sensitive interventions implemented by these sectors complementary to nutrition specific programs. These interventions are tweaked in its design to deliver effective nutrition outcomes.

Here are key approaches to make nutrition sensitive programs potentially effective.

• Targeting nutritionally vulnerable groups by protecting their rights. These include women of reproductive age, pregnant and lactating women, children 6-23 months old, pre-school and school age children, adolescent girls and elderly.
• Increase production of diverse, nutrient- dense foods and improve processing. Conserve, produce and re-popularize indigenous vegetables, which are nutrient dense. Installing policies and programs which incentivize production of diverse and nutrient- dense food.
• Increase market access and opportunities for nutritious foods. Improve market access, availability, and affordability to enable more families to purchase nutritious food.
• Incorporate nutrition behavior change communication. Inculcate nutrition knowledge, good attitude for change strategy to ensure improvements in the socio-economic status describe to better nutrition
• Coordinate with relevant multi-sectoral partners in planning and implementing nutrition sensitive programs. Merge nutrition specific interventions of other sectors within the delivery mechanism of selected nutrition sensitive program.
• Empower women. Increasing access on skills training.
• Recognize WASH to emphasize in nutrition counseling, education, and other promotional activities.
• Dealing with existing government programming of different line agencies in agriculture, education, and social welfare.

We need to work together and invest in the health and nutrition of Filipino children to give the next generation a chance of a better future. // ND II Karen F. Abe, RND