The two images above are very contrasting. While one child looks very healthy, well-nurtured, carefree and appear pleasantly disposed with the world; the other looks unhealthy, with sunken eyeballs, hollow cheeks, helpless, unloved, in great need and very forlorn .Their varied looks is as a result of the kind of nutrition each of them gets. What then is nutrition?
Nutrition is the good we get from all the food we eat and it helps our bodies work. Food is made up of different types of nutrients that contribute to our food being nutritious. There are macronutrients, micronutrients, as well as soluble and insoluble fibers which make up the nutrition landscape. Micronutrients are so called because they are needed by the body in relatively small amounts than the macronutrients. Macronutrients include carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids, fats and oils, as well as water; while micronutrients include vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals.
If our bodies fail to get all the nutrients they need, this is called malnutrition .If a person suffers from malnutrition, they can be more likely to catch diseases and it can affect the functions of their body such as brain, eyesight, organs, height, weight as well as the normal formation of body parts if the child is still in the mothers’ womb.
The end product of a well nurtured body is evidenced in robust health which ensures that the different body parts function maximally. It is in an effort to universalize the essence of balanced diet/nutrition that food processing and packaging companies were directed by the World Health Organization (WHO),to provide nutritional information on their products for the guidance of lay people. This nutritional information is found in a corner of every good food packaging, showing the recommended daily amounts (RDA) of each nutrient and what the package contains.
Deriving from the above preamble, it is not out of place to state that a well improved nutrition improves educability and teachability. A better nourished, less hungry child is more attentive and able to learn more easily. This is common sense. My two children who are toddlers exhibit this characteristic a lot. Once they get hungry, they fret and cry so much-nothing consoles them until they get fed again. By implication then, a well-nourished brain means a bright, curios conversational little child who finds life a rewarding experience and sees grown-ups as quite friendly and reasonable. Relationships and learning hold great potential when the developing brain is free from malnutrition.
Education is best understood as an investment in human resources. Hence national education is a nation’s investment in its human resources to effectively minimize waste and maximize resources. Educability and teachability refers to the potential a child has to achieve age-appropriate, specific-curricular and learning objectives, regardless of whether or not a child is actually enrolled in school.
Education is administered through schools. However, according to a UNESCO report, a good school plant and high quality instruction cannot produce the intended educational outcomes when children are too sick, too weak or too distracted to learn. Nutrition and health problems impinge on the quality of the biochemical organism and impede the acquisition of skills and abilities needed to progress satisfactorily in primary school. When there are many such children enrolled in primary schools, the education sector performs inefficiently, optimal returns on investments are not achieved, and progress toward a wide range of development goals are forestalled. And if significant numbers of children are no longer participants in the formal school system, because their health and nutrition status have rendered satisfactory academic progress an unattainable goal, the result is development, and dreams dangerously deferred, the report concludes.
The negative impacts of poor nutrition on health and by extension national education manifest in the following classified conditions: Protein-Energy malnutrition (PEM), Micronutrient deficiency disorders, Helminithic or worm infection, Sensory impairment, and Temporary hunger. (Interregional project, UNDP). Out of this lot, the micronutrient deficiency disorders (e.g. iodine deficiency, iron deficiency, anemia, vitamin A deficiency,) and temporary hunger poses the greatest threat to national education in Nigeria. For greater clarity, let’s look at one isolated example-iron deficiency. Iron is necessary for a number of enzymes to work normally. It can greatly impact strength, activity, alertness, and also the ability to respond to a structured test. Without adequate iron, children start depleting their iron stores in the bone marrow and liver to make red blood cells. Eventually, they become anemic .They are more susceptible to fatigue and their physical work performance decreases. And then finally, iron deficiency affects them mentally, in their thought processes-this is just one nutrient out of many.
Malnutrition is noticeable in the interruption of a child’s healthy growth pattern usually resulting in low height and weight for age.
Currently greater weight –for- height is a nutritional status indicator. This means that if a child seems very very small for his or her age, or appears to have lost significant weight over a small period of time, something is wrong. The child should be screened for a possible deficiency and appropriate aid administered as soon as possible.
In this light, the peak 123 and 456 range is an excellent response to growing children’s micro nutritional needs as they are made to meet their growth and development needs age-appropriately.
The way forward for Nigeria in tackling this global trend lies in a more vigorous campaign raising child quality awareness. This has already been pledged to by most of the world’s governments at the 1990 World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtein, Thailand under the joint sponsorship of UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank. Micronutrient supplementation, deworming programme, early childhood interventions, and the provision of school meal/snacks remain the agreed methods of tackling this monster. The federal governments’ national program on immunization, supplementation of vitamin A micronutrient, as well as the introduction of the free meal a day for primary school children is highly commendable and should be sustained.
It is also worthy to mention here that the educational status of mothers is known to be a consistent predictor of the quality of care their children receive and of their nutritional status and survival prospects. In fact, apart from crippling poverty, stark illiteracy ranks among the major causes of malnutrition worldwide. Therefore, investment in human resource promoting factors through enlightenment programs targeted at women of child bearing age, focusing on essential nutritional education, health and women’s roles in family health should be given prominence as this will lead to sustained nutritional improvement. Breastfeeding remains the most vital source of micronutrients for babies and mothers should know this. Information is power.
The Nigerian national education is aligned with the millennium development goals (MDG’S) which canvasses basic education for all by the year 2015.UBE established by an act of Parliament in the year 2004 is Nigeria’s response to that clarion call. The World Bank, through the British council is already in alliance, working to monitor the progress of UBE, under execution by the various local education authorities. The focal points are to reduce to the barest minimum, these educationally limiting conditions in children through low cost intervention strategies that can halt their negative impact on learning and school achievement.
In conclusion, and by way of recommendation, I think that UNICEF’s model of a school health program is highly appropriate and comprehensive. It reads:
UNICEF’s School Health Program
Health and Nutrition Services
Screening for common health problems
Prevention and treatment of common health problems; first aid
Linkages and referral between schools and health services
School feeding programs
Knowledge and Skills for Health
Curriculum development for skills based education
Extracurricular school health activities, such as school health clubs
or child to child activities
Physical education and sports.
A Healthy and Supportive Environment
Clean water and sanitation in schools
Policies for ethical relations between teachers and students; for example support for
pregnant girls
Positive psychosocial environment.
Nigeria is a developing nation .Thus, any social expenditure such as that which the above model advocates will not only have the short term effect of relieving malnourished children and making them educationally more viable; it will have a long term inter –generational effect on human well-being. The long term benefit translates to economic productivity as a better educated person is likely to be more receptive to innovation, to seek out and benefit from opportunities for change more readily. This is the core of social support.
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