• Breastfeeding is key to the attainment of MDG 1, which focuses on eradicating extreme
hunger and poverty.

By MIRIAM ZIMBA –
THE Civil Society Organisation for Scaling Up Nutrition (CSO-SUN) has implored mothers to ensure their babies are breastfed.
In a statement made available to Times Health, CSO-SUN executive director William Chilufya explained that breastfeeding was a key intervention for improving child survival.
He said breastfeeding was also potentially known to reduce child mortality by about 20 per cent for children under the age of five years.
This comes in the wake of the just ended World Breastfeeding Week, which has been commemorated between August 1 to 7, annually, since 1982.
The World Breastfeeding Week is a special event which allows government, partners, health workers, civil society and the public to support breastfeeding mothers and appreciate their role in nurturing and raising healthy children.
This year’s theme “Breastfeeding: A Winning Goal for Life”, asserts the importance of increasing and sustaining the protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding – in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) countdown and beyond.
“By protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding we can all can contribute to each of the MDGs in a substantial way,” Mr Chilufya said.
“Early and exclusive breastfeeding has been shown repeatedly to be the single most effective way to prevent infant death; it plays a major role in children’s health and development, and significantly benefits the health of mothers,” he added.
Mr Chilufya said breastfeeding is key to the attainment MDG 1, which focuses on eradicating extreme hunger and poverty.
He said exclusive and continued breastfeeding should be encouraged for the first two years of a child’s life, because breast milk provides high quality nutrients and adequate energy to prevent hunger and malnutrition.
“Breastfeeding is a natural and low-cost way of feeding babies and children. It is affordable for everyone and does not burden household budgets as compared to artificial feeding,” he said.
Mr Chilufya said breastfeeding is the best way of providing safe, free, ideal food for healthy growth and development of newborn babies.
This is because breast milk is the natural first food for babies, it provides all the energy and nutrients that infants need in the first six months of life, it continues to provide up to half or more of a child’s nutritional needs during the second half of the first year, and up to one third during the second year of life.
However, breastfeeding is constantly under threat from sub-optimal care practices arising from cultural myths, false claims from advertisers, marketers of infant formula and other breast milk substitutes.
These are some of the challenges that undermine our mothers’ confidence and capacity to breastfeed successfully and also contribute to the high rates of illnesses and deaths among infants.
New mothers are usually bombarded with misleading information and advice from people around them, as well as from aggressive commercials by formula manufacturers.
Information from such sources can lead to adoption of poor health care practices.
“We need to protect our mothers from such influences.  It is for this reason that the Government should enforce and ensure that Breast Milk Substitutes (BMS) regulations are adequate in order to prevent violation and to protect breastfeeding mothers,” Mr Chilufya said.
He implored the government to consider increasing taxation of harmful and unhealthy food products and having a 15 per cent of these taxes earmarked specifically for nutrition-sensitive interventions (Agriculture, Education, Social Protection and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene).
In an earlier statement, The World Health Organisation and the International Labour Organization (ILO) affirmed strong support for working mothers in the formal and informal sector for adequate maternity leave.
These organisations emphasised that upon return to work, mothers need to be able to breastfeed their babies in line with ILO Convention 183.
The Maternity Convention 2000 (No.183) is the most recent standard accompanied by the Maternity Protection Recommendation, 2000 (No. 191).
Convention No. 183 broadens the scope of coverage to all employed women, no matter what occupation or type of undertaking, including those women employed in atypical forms of dependent work who often received no protection as well as extending entitlements to 14 weeks (98 days) of leave.
Recommendation No.191 suggests that this period be at least 18 weeks (126 days). Expanding the scope of maternity protection as foreseen in the Convention No. 183 is of crucial importance in ensuring the health and well being of greater numbers of women workers and their children worldwide.
Currently Zambia has two laws for maternity protection: (1) the employment act CAP 268 and (2) statutory instruments (SI) 56 and 57 of 2008.
The employment act provides for 90 days maternity leave for workers in formal employment while the SI provides 120 days for vulnerable workers who have no collective agreement or not unionized.
Given that paid work is central to the lives of all men and women, protecting women’s employment and economic security during maternity are vital elements for safe pregnancies, healthy mothers and newborns.
Government, therefore, needS to promote laws and mechanisms that enhance implementation of maternity protection in Zambia.