By Allison Kozicharow; Edited by Elizabeth Fine
Child malnutrition is on the rise in Kisumu, Kenya, according to WiRED International’s community health worker (CHW) team.
Sadly, malnutrition is part of life in Kenya; but the current spike in children was caught by CHWs as they performed routine tests in WiRED’s Health Screening Clinics.
Our CHWs reported the child malnutrition uptick and requested additional guidance from WiRED on malnutrition. WiRED responded to this urgent need by speeding up production of a new module on nutrition, which we expect to complete in a week to 10 days.
Note that WiRED already offers an entire module series on maternal and child health. We know that the path to a lifetime of good nutrition begins for a future child even before the mother is pregnant. WiRED’s upcoming nutrition module will help CHWs teach families how to address child nutrition in an environment short on food and funds.
The observations of WiRED’s CHWs in Kisumu come in a much larger context of child malnutrition globally. Abrupt international funding reductions, including significant cuts to foreign assistance programs such as USAID, have led to a sharp surge in child malnutrition in low-resource countries. For instance, according to UNICEF, USAID previously financed roughly 50% of global supplies for Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, a lifesaving peanut-paste treatment that saved severely malnourished children. The sudden freeze of these aid programs has disrupted vital nutrition support for more than 14 million children. Global health experts and aid organizations warn that these reductions threaten to reverse decades of progress in combating global stunting and child mortality.
WiRED’s module team is always standing by to create or update modules quickly when a new disease (e.g., COVID-19), outbreak (e.g., Ebola) or health condition threatens a community.
Please watch for our website story when WiRED launches our new nutrition module.
WiRED’s Health Screening Clinics Lead to Prompt Treatment of Health Conditions
CHWs teach their communities about hundreds of health topics, including nutrition and healthy diets. They also conduct health screening clinics to:
- test and identify potential health problems such as high blood pressure and tuberculosis, which are most treatable when detected early;
- take other vital signs and measures for general health assessments, such as weight, height, blood oxygen and in specific cases, blood sugar;
- offer vision screening for children and adults;
- provide basic clinical services to treat bumps, cuts and bruises; and
- offer disease prevention training and referral services where appropriate to professional health services.
