Tackling malnutrition to improve lives in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
Mozambique loses an estimated 10.9 percent of its Gross Domestic Product each year to childhood undernutrition. WFP warns that the prosperity of future generations and the country is at stake.
By Sean Rajman
A small plane lands on a dirt airstrip. Four men arrive in a pick-up truck. They are here from the district Health Authority, to collect one tonne of Ready-to-Use-Supplementary-Food, or RUSF, used to treat and prevent child malnutrition.
The airstrip is in Palma Sede (Portuguese for ‘town’). It’s the only remaining secure town in the far north-east Cabo Delgado, where more than half a million people have been forced to flee their homes due to conflict. Escalating insecurity in the surrounding areas has left Palma Sede so cut-off and isolated that supplies of goods, including food, have become almost completely disrupted. Nelson Tarzane, a Health Authority pharmacist in Palma Sede, tells me that cultivating food is now almost impossible as well. Most farms are outside the town, and farmers are too afraid to travel to them.
The ongoing crisis is the reason the plane has come today. Delivering RUSF by road has become unviable due to insecurity, so WFP is airlifting it in instead. It’s the first time WFP has done this in Mozambique.
I have come to meet Ali Juma, he is a Nutrition Programme Associate, and coordinates WFP’s nutrition treatment to over 1,400 small children and 500 mothers every month in Cabo Delgado. Born in a neighboring province, he is deeply familiar with northern Mozambique, and speaks several local languages. This enables him to organize WFP’s nutrition programmes seemingly effortlessly, even in the most remote areas of isolated Cabo Delgado.
After travelling for almost two hours on a rough, dirt road I meet up with him in Churavo, a small village in Chiure district. We sit down in the small village to discuss the situation in the province.
As a Mozambican and father of two, Ali is understandably worried.
“People are suffering because of insecurity and hunger,” he says. In 2019, before the insurgency caused mass displacement, Cabo Delgado was hit by Tropical Cyclone Kenneth — the strongest recorded cyclone to make landfall in Mozambique. Cyclone Kenneth also caused displacement, a spike in waterborne diseases and the widespread destruction of crops.
However, Ali is quick to point out that while the cyclone and the conflict caused a dramatic increase in child malnutrition, it is not a new challenge here: Mozambique already had some of the worst nutrition statistics in the world. Nationwide, 43% of children under 5 were found to be chronically malnourished in 2015. In Cabo Delgado, these rates were considerably higher at 53%. It is estimated that this figure has increased still further in the intervening years.
Ali is part of a WFP nutrition team that supports the national and local government to both treat and prevent malnutrition, and organizes community events to achieve change at grassroots level.
“Strengthening local capacity by training staff of national and district health authorities and actively involving the population is crucial,” says Ali. “It’s the only way to achieve sustainability, to build a resilient population that is less and less dependent on outside help.”
Progress made towards such independence is in peril, however. WFP nutrition programming in the Cabo Delgado faces the double threat of conflict and a lack of financial commitment. The insecurity has forced WFP to reduce the geographical scope of its nutrition support, but it still reaches 57 health centres in 9 districts. As well as these, WFP is now working through governmental mobile nutrition clinics, whose very mobility mitigates some of the security risks.
Though the insecurity is challenging WFP’s ability to reach all the districts in Cabo Delgado, a lack of funding remains the biggest threat to the nutrition programmes. With current funding ending in March 2021, WFP needs USD 2.54 million to continue its lifesaving support. The issue is even bigger than saving lives though. The economic potential of Mozambique and thus the welfare of its population is severely affected. According to the Cost of Hunger in Africa study (2017), Mozambique loses an estimated 10.9 percent, or USD 1.6 billion, of its Gross Domestic Product each year to childhood undernutrition. As Ali notes grimly, “The prosperity of future generations and the country is at stake.”
