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

Training Post-secondary training is needed to create a critical mass of nutrition professionals in
the country.
Curative
nutrition
Therapeutic feeding centers often fail to treat severely malnourished children. Moreover,
children at such centers are exposed to new diseases, placing an additional burden on
their caregivers. Community therapeutic centers, by contrast, have simple protocols:
drugs and dietary treatment. They also allow for the prevision of health education to
mothers.
Source: Compiled by author.
As described in Table 6.5, it is clear that the lessons learned from the many efforts to
address malnutrition in Ethiopia, as well as lessons learned from elsewhere, have provided a
relatively solid understanding of what needs to be done to sustainably reduce malnutrition.
Nutrition can be improved and we know the success factors required.
Setting aside much of the technical detail of what must be done to combat
malnutrition, among the practical considerations that we can draw from all of this evidence is
that people, including people who are poor, must develop themselves. They are key actors in
their own development. They must be able to make real choices in doing so. Community-led
efforts are critically important. Services should be brought within the communities through
outreach and be implemented by community members. Communities should be involved in
decision-making and in implementing actions and should be empowered through training and
poverty reduction actions. Local leaders should be involved in nutrition activity supervision in
order to increase ownership, to promote community participation, and to build an
understanding of nutrition as a development problem. However, we should also be cautious of
both pure top-down and bottom-up approaches. An appropriate mix of both approaches is
required.
However, past and current nutrition activities in Ethiopia, while many may have been
or are locally successful, have not enjoyed the degree of success that the problem of
malnutrition in the country demands. There are important complementarities between
nutrition actors, programs, and sectors that must be exploited. Opportunities exist for
coordinating, scaling-up, and maximizing outputs from existing programs and investments
and extending those activities. These must be fully exploited. The National Nutrition Strategy
provides an important element for the promotion of such coordinated direct action and for
ensuring that where there are gaps in the interventions undertaken – whether human,
financial, or institutional – these gaps are effectively filled in a timely manner. Only if this is
done can we expect significant and sustained reductions in the numbers of malnourished
people in Ethiopia.
6.3. Detailed Overview of Nutrition Interventions in Ethiopia
The set of tables below contains a non-exhaustive of nutrition interventions carried
out by the government, international development, agencies, and NGOs in Ethiopia. A
summary of some of this information was presented earlier in Table 6.2 and Table 6.3. Here
more detail is provided.
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