Breastfeeding goes up by 40 percent
Interpersonal contact between healthcare workers and mothers have produced a large scale improvement in infant and young child feeding programme and in hand washing habits, said speakers at a seminar yesterday.
Moreover, awareness created through communities and mass media facilitated the improvement, they added.
Referring to a baseline and an endline survey conducted in 2010 and 2014 respectively in 50 upazilas where community-based Alive & Thrive programme was implemented by Brac, they said exclusive breastfeeding went up to 88 percent from 48, and the percentage of mothers washing hands before feeding young children improved from 23 percent to 31.
They were addressing a dissemination seminar on Alive & Thrive programme, lessons learned and evaluation results on infant and young children feeding practices in Bangladesh, held at Brac Centre Inn in the capital.
"People in Bangladesh are very receptive," said Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, speaker in parliament, at the programme.
Praising the programme, she urged NGOs and development organisations to team up with the government and use government networks to reach a larger community.
Launched in 2009 in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia with funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Canadian and Irish governments, Alive & Thrive used advocacy, interpersonal communication and community mobilisation, mass media and strategic data to improve breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices and to reduce stunting and anaemia in young children.
Besides, Brac and other international development organisations joined the initiative under the management of FHI 360, a US-based organisation.
Dr Tina Sanghvi, country programme director and senior technical advisor, Alive & Thrive said Bangladesh's improvement in breastfeeding was better than Vietnam and Ethiopia where the exclusive breastfeeding increased from 19 percent to 58 and 72 percent to 83 respectively.
Complementary feeding with diet diversity increased in Bangladesh from 32 percent to 64, she said.
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