* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
By Elisabeth Anderson Rapport, Action Against Hunger
For 29-year-old Congolese mother Bitondo Patience, malnutrition was a silent threat that attacked her daughter without obvious indicators. Her four-year-old, Wabiwa, showed signs of illness — vomiting, lack of appetite and a temperature — but just what afflicted her was a mystery to
Bitondo.
It wasn’t until her little girl’s feet started to swell that Bitondo got scared. Two weeks after Wabiwa got sick, Botindo took her to see a traditional healer, but she didn’t improve.
But when volunteer health screeners supervised by ACF came to Bitondo and Wabiwa’s home village of Kalama, things changed quickly and for the better. Wabiwa’s swollen feet helped screeners make a quick diagnosis of malnutrition, and take her for free treatment at a health centre in Kilambwigali.
ACF, in collaboration with the Congolese Ministry of Health, provides such screenings in abundance in D.R. Congo, a nation reeling from decades of conflict and neglect. The organisation has developed a robust relationship with the Ministry of Health to strengthen the capacity of D.R. Congo’s health system in tackling child malnutrition by combining direct interventions with technical and logistical support for local health actors.
This collaboration with the Ministry of Health has resulted in highly successful innovations that have enabled the government to deploy medical resources, technical know-how and nutritional support across its vast territory in response to deadly outbreaks of malnutrition.
The goal is not to create a parallel health system within the Congolese one, but to integrate malnutrition within existing systems and resources to ensure sustainable solutions to child malnutrition in the country.
At the community level, Action Against Hunger is training volunteer village health teams to diagnose malnutrition and refer affected children for outpatient treatment, or if they have severe medical or nutritional complications, to Therapeutic Feeding Centres for around-the-clock care.
By tapping into a national programme of Community Health Workers already in place, thousands of volunteers have received training to ensure families of acutely malnourished children know where they can seek help.
In 2010 alone, ACF trained nearly 4,000 public health workers and equipped 476 treatment centres, ensuring that 42,000 severely malnourished people — the vast majority of them children like Wabiwa — received life-saving care.
Bringing Baby Wabiwa back to health
Every Thursday morning, Bitondo made the more than five mile trek with her daughter from Kalama to Kilambwigali, to the nearest outpatient centre, where nurses trained by ACF nurses are treating and monitoring acutely malnourished children during their weekly visits.
Bitondo says the journey was well worth it, as Wabiwa received high-quality nutritional therapy, including protein-dense ready-to-use therapeutic foods. These innovative foods have revolutionised the treatment of child malnutrition, allowing children to be treated at home, and enabling health actors to scale up nutritional programmes and reach more children than ever before.
Although the journey on foot was long, Bitondo is grateful that she could take her daughter to get care and then bring her home the same day; she does, after all, have four more children at home and another on the way.
“It was a blessing for our family that Wabiwa could stay with us at home while receiving treatment for her malnutrition," Bitondo said. "I was able to be present for her and to my other children, as well.”
After completing just two weeks of nutritional treatment, little Wabiwa was thriving. The oedema in her feet had disappeared, as had her fever and vomiting symptoms. Her appetite grew strong.
And only a month after first setting foot in the Kilambwigali centre, Wabiwa has been given a clean bill of health. She has recovered from her malnutrition. She’s seen such hardship in her young life, but in four short weeks, she was back to being four years old.
Elisabeth Anderson Rapport, is a communications officer at Action Against Hunger - USA.This blog is part of AlertNet’s Solutions for a Hungry World special report. It first appeared on the Action Against Hunger - USA website.
