Addressing Acute Malnutrition Among Children Under Five and Reproductive-Age Women
Our Nutrition programmes focus on basic lifesaving and building the resilience of targeted communities through the promotion of integrated nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive behavior. HIJRA works to enhance equitable access to and utilization of quality, high-impact mother and child nutrition interventions aimed at reducing acute malnutrition and contributing to lowering of child mortality and morbidity rates. The HIJRA nutrition programming in Somalia focused on ensuring improved, integrated, and quality basic nutrition services for children and pregnant and lactating women including IDPs are available and effectively utilized and that there is improved knowledge of essential nutrition behaviour for the targeted communities. This Multi-Sectoral, integrated approach is at the core of the HIJRA nutrition programming strategy. The interventions focused on basic life-saving activities and community resilience-building activities within the target communities aimed at ensuring an interplay of multiple sectors (WASH, Health, and livelihood) in addressing malnutrition taking cognizance of the fact that sustainable solutions require an integrated approach to undertaking the interventions. Recent HIJRA Nutrition interventions in Somalia have focused on identifying cases of malnutrition through weekly surveillance and reporting of emerging trends, identifying cases of SAM and organizing for their admission into OPT centers, and to a large extent screening under 5 children for malnutrition.