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

• Enhance women’s capacity for caring.
• Increase women’s access to and autonomy to decide on use of household
resources.
• Promote the establishment of community support groups and linkages with food
security programs.
• Raise awareness of the importance of sharing the burden of caregiving by
husbands and other non-parental members of the household (siblings and others)
both at the community and household levels.
• Increase female educational attainment through gendered awareness creation,
affirmative action, and through informal education.
• Raise women’s knowledge of child feeding and caring practices through home
visit programs by integrated teams of kebele development workers.
• Increase women’s income and employment status through raising micro credit
schemes and entrepreneurship interventions at the community level.
• Promote time saving technologies for women – grain mills, alternative fuel
sources, water sources, improved stoves.
• Establish community day care centers for both rural and urban women.
• Promote maternal nutrition during pregnancy and lactation.
• Promote health care utilization by the mother (antenatal care, delivery care,
postnatal care, and family planning).
• Include caring as one of the values presented in the Civics education syllabus at
the primary and secondary schools.
• Give special attention to the care of vulnerable segments of society (children, women,
elderly people, and disabled) during emergency and crisis situations.
• Make sure that essential caring practices – optimal breastfeeding, optimal
complementary feeding – are not compromised due to crisis.
• Maintain access to water and continued use of hygienic practices.
• Protect the vulnerable from accidents, abuses, and dangers.
• Support operations research on better caring practices.
• Monitor and evaluate at all levels and disseminate findings. For preplanning and for
evaluation, use the “triple-A cycle approach”.
4.5.2. What are the advantages of having a NNS in place?
The national nutrition strategy is necessary to focus on strategic issues to address
chronic nutritional problems in Ethiopia. Without a well-designed strategy all efforts will be
poorly coordinated and will compete with one another rather than resulting in sustainable
solutions. The national nutrition strategy will:
• Facilitate the necessary institutional arrangements for effective care.
• Mainstream care to the various sectors as a cross-cutting issue.
• Establish an institutional framework for advocacy for and the monitoring and
evaluation of better caring practices.
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