An assessment of the causes of malnutrition in Ethiopia: A ...

4.3.6.2. Time demands of urban caregivers
Although urban women will take advantage of opportunities for informal, temporary
work, lack of preparation for work opportunities and the inability to plan causes disruption in
child-care patterns for those women in the informal economy. Opportunities for wage labor
take priority over the needs of infants and young children. Mothers cannot plan for these
occasions; they never know when work will be available. If they are able to obtain work for a
few days, the pay is too low and the occasion too brief to employ household help. In this
situation, infants are left in the care of neighbors or relatives.
For the majority of the urban poor, regular salaried employment is rare. Only monthly
salaried workers receive either maternity leave or maternity entitlements of any kind. More
often, women workers are fired when their pregnancy becomes obvious. Another factor
affecting women's capacity to care for their infants and young children is scheduling.
Unpredictable shift changes, night work, and lack of control over work schedules make child
care difficult. In addition, the patterns of feeding for infants and young children may change
significantly from the beginning to the middle or end of the month or pay period, depending
on available income (AED/Linkages 2004).
4.3.6.3. Models of good care
In agrarian societies with high fertility and high mortality, parents are usually guided
by cultural modes, the goal of which is to maximize the number of surviving offspring, but
not to optimize the growth and development of each one. It can be pointed out that societies in
which the concept of child spacing has not been adopted simply may not have the time,
knowledge, or motivation to deal with growth and development. These models for parental
behavior are themselves adaptations, culturally evolved over the centuries to conditions of
labor-intensive family agricultural production and natural fertility. The first condition creates
a demand for child labor in the home: the more children, the more land can be cultivated and
the more work distributed (Engle 1992b). However, caregivers usually learn good caregiving
practices from what they observe in their surroundings. Neighboring mothers with positive
deviance success stories will serve as a role model for good caring practices. The other
models of child caring in the Ethiopian context are grandmothers and elderly women.
Particularly young women learn many caring practices, like breastfeeding, complementary
feeding, and child washing and caring during illness, from their own mothers. This implies
that involving grandmothers and other elderly women who have successfully reared their own
children in community support groups will have beneficial effect in improving caring
practices at the household level throughout the community.
4.4. Care-focused Initiatives in Ethiopia by Government Sectors and NGOs
4.4.1. Assessment of care focused initiatives in Ethiopia
In Ethiopia there are different care focused in itiatives that are being implemented or
planned to be implemented both by governmental and non-governmental organizations. In
Table 4.3 below the activities of different care focused initiatives in Ethiopia are reviewed.
The purpose of this analysis is to examine the aspects of care for the vulnerable people they
are addressing and the activities they do in order to build upon their experiences during the
development of the National Nutrition Strategy (NNS).
During consultative meetings with funding agencies, NGOs, regional food security
bureaus, and ministries for the preparation of national nutrition strategy, it was observed that
care, which is the link between food availability and nutritional status, is the weakest point of
all interventions.
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