Children: High Rates of Malnutrition
YO:
About 5,000 children are forced to live on the streets in four Yemeni governorates, according to the results of the first stage of a new comprehensive survey of street children. This first stage began on December 4th and ended last week. It was carried out by the Supreme Council of Motherhood and Childhood, in cooperation with the Arab Council for Childhood and Development Support in the Yemeni governorates of Sana’a, Aden, Taiz, and Hodeida.
YO:
Malnutrition in Yemen has reached such dire proportions that the country has asked the international community for urgent aid, said Dr. Abdul-Kareem Ras’e, Yemen’s Minister of Public Health and Population at a workshop in December in Sana’a. About 53 percent of Yemen’s population is estimated to suffer from malnutrition.
“The malnutrition problem for children under five years of age is one of the most prominent health problems in this country,” said Ras’e in a request to the United Nations World Food Organization. “It should be faced by increasing the cooperation between Yemen and the UN World Food Program.” Dr. Abdul-Kareem al-Arhabi, Yemen’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, highlighted the fact that malnutrition not only affects young children, but also pregnant and lactating mothers.
He warned that this is an increasingly common health problem in Yemen. More than 24,000 Yemeni children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition, said officials of the new Country Program, run by the UN World Food Program in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Health and Population and the Ministry of Education, which is expected to be implemented in Yemen during the next five years. It will provide about 69,000 tons of material help, such as food, to the educational and health fields.
70 percent of the aid will go toward the education of children from the 1st grade to the 12th grade, and 30 percent will go toward improving health care. “The goal of this program is to encourage girls, especially in the rural areas, to enroll in schools and provide better nutrition for children and their mothers. Also, it aims to give help to people who suffer from diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy,” said Dr. Najeeb Abdul-Baqi, the manager of the Nutrition Department in the Ministry of Public Health and Population.
Preparations are being made in the Yemeni Specifications and Standards Authority with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization to complete a project to establish a National Food Law Committee. The establishment of the National Food Law Committee will be formally announced at the end of February. The cabinet made the decision to establishing such a committee after a technical team composed of experts from the FAO and Authority designed the necessary procedures to establish the Committee.
A workshop will be organized in Sana’a next week on food safety, aimed at strengthening the national food control system in Yemen. Yemen is one of the least developed countries in the world. Its widespread nutritional deficit is likely the result of Yemen’s extremely low national income, as well as the poor state of education in the country.
The fact that roughly 50 percent of a families income goes towards qat is also a factor. In 2005 the UN Development Program (UNDP) ranked Yemen 151st out of 177 in the List of Countries by Human Development Index. According to the United Nations World Food Program, almost half the people in Yemen do not have enough to eat. About 40 percent of Yemen’s population of 20 million lives below the poverty line on less than $2 per day. Moreover, opportunities to receive education and health care are limited, especially in rural areas, where 88 percent of women and 36 percent of men are illiterate, the report shows. The World Bank has noted that the average annual income was only $450 in 2003, and Yemen’s unemployment rate was close to 40 percent in that same year.
“Malnutrition is one of the main challenges in Yemen, where 46 percent – almost half – of the children are underweight,” said Naseem Ur-Rehman, communications coordinator at UNICEF’s Sana’a office. “The magnitude of the problem is huge, as underweight children are particularly vulnerable to diseases, compounding the issue.” Health indicators also reveal other serious problems. The number of mothers who die during childbirth is increasing faster than in the world’s most underdeveloped countries.
In 2005, the infant mortality rate (for babies under 1 year of age) was 76 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to UNICEF. The rate for children under five was 102. The UN World Food Program began its nutritional aid project in Yemen in 1967, with the aim of providing nutritional resources to as many women and children as possible, as well as supporting the efforts of the Yemeni government to decrease national poverty rates. Since 1967, the UN World Food Program to Yemen has contributed more than $3 million.
Of that amount, 37 percent has been directed toward education, 31 percent toward agriculture and rural development, 22 percent toward health, 6 percent toward natural disasters and 4 percent toward refugee assistance in Yemen. The project addresses educational issues with the hope that national educational improvement leads to improvements in the general health of the population. In 2003, the project targeted 1,300 schools in 85 rural districts in areas suffering from high rates of poverty, malnutrition and extreme gender disparity in school enrolment.
Those 1,300 schools make up about 10 percent of Yemen’s schools. To correct the gender disparity in school enrolment, the project encourages families to send their girls to school and allow them to continue their studies by providing nutritional food for school girls. By providing food to school children, the project aims to achieve the dual goal of encouraging enrolment and decreasing malnutrition ntionally.
The UN World Food Programme in Yemen is supported by Saudi Arabia, The United States Agency for International Development, the European Union, Japan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The Committee on Children’s Rights notes that there have been some efforts made by the Yemeni government to combat the child and infant mortality rates, but the committee remains concerned about the increasing prevalence of malnutrition and the extremely limited access to health services in rural areas.
The committee has suggested that the government strengthen its efforts to provide health care facilities for women, such as prenatal and post-natal clinics. It also emphasizes the government’s responsibility to provide appropriate training for health workers, especially in remote areas. The Committee recommends that the government cooperate further with international entities such as UNICEF to establish more development programs.
