increase the rate of exclusive breastfeeding to at least 75% by 2025
Description
Priority actions:
Health system
• Scale up the implementation of baby-friendly hospital and community initiatives (BFHI and BFCI) and include Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) for small and sick neonates.
• Advocate for and create awareness through global and national events that promote mother, infant and young child nutrition (MIYCN); including programmes like World Breastfeeding Week, World Food Day, Nutrition Week, World Prematurity Day or Malezi Bora.
• Promote optimal complementary feeding (from 6 to 23 months of age) and integrate infant and young child nutrition initiatives into early childhood development and multisectoral platforms between the Ministry of Health and line ministries (all).
• Promote workplace support initiatives for women to combine work and breastfeeding, both in the formal and informal sectors.
• Integrate MIYCN interventions into early childhood development (ECD) initiatives.
• Develop/review policies, standards and guidelines in line with the international standards, conventions and global commitments on MIYCN (MIYCN policy, strategy and training packages, feeding preterm and low-birth-weight guidelines, MIYCN-E operational guidance, Breastmilk Substitute (BMS) Act regulations and training curiculum) and disseminate to front-line health workers, monitor implementation and evaluate policy performance and impact.
• Strengthen mechanisms for implementation, monitoring and enforcement of the international code and enforcement of the BMS Act and regulations on unhealthy foods to minimise harmful effects to children due to inappropriate marketing.
• Strengthen capacity of front-line health workers on MIYCN interventions.
• Strengthen MIYCN information systems for decision-making and growth monitoring and promotion for children under 2 years of age.
Food System
• Promote technologies and strengthen food value chains that aim to improve the availability, affordability and consumption of healthy and nutritious diets, including dark green leafy vegetables, biofortified staples and tubers, underutilised indigenous and climate-resilient crops and livestock.
• Promote biofortification of potential food crops, using conventional breeding techniques, as part of food security and agricultural resilience strategies to improve the diets of vulnerable rural communities that rely heavily on a few staples.
• Improve storage capacity, postharvest loss management, distribution, and transport infrastructure; promote value addition and minimal processing to improve household food access to healthy and nutritious diets at all times. Activity to be integrated with nutrition education.
• Improve production and market access for diverse nutritious foods, including improving postharvest loss management, storage, distribution and transport infrastructure.
• Improve agriculture income to enhance dietary diversity, including value addition of crop and livestock products and integration of nutrition education in agribusiness programmes.
• Promote livelihood diversification to improve climate-resilience of livestock and crop-dependent communities and households.
• Improve analysis, decision-making and response as well as the design of nutrition-sensitive interventions, including evidence generation for nutrition-sensitive programming.
Social Protection
• Integrate nutrition interventions in cash and in-kind transfers.
Overarching commitment (for commitments submitted pre-2025)
Title
Maintain child wasting at less than 4%
Description
Kenya is one of the frontrunner countries in adopting and customising the Global Action Plan on Child Wasting (GAP). The multisectoral country action plan on child wasting is aligned to the GAP and four outcomes across the health, food, social protection, and water, sanitation and hygiene systems: 1) Reduced low birth weight by improving maternal nutrition; 2) Improved child health by improving access to primary healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene services, and enhanced food safety; 3) Improved infant and young child feeding by promoting optimal breastfeeding practices and complementary feeding; and 4) Improved treatment of wasting among children, pregnant and lactating women, and people living with HIV by strengthening health systems and integrating treatment into routine primary health services.
Details on the specific interventions can be accessed on https://www.childwasting.org/.
GNR assessment
| Verification status |
Unverified
Find out more
|
|---|---|
| SMARTness index |
Upper moderate
Find out more
|
Details
| Target population characteristic |
|
|---|---|
| Global nutrition target(s) |
Anaemia
Low birth weight
Exclusive breastfeeding
Childhood stunting
Childhood wasting
|
| Nutrition Action Classification(s) |
Impact >
Diet
Find out more
|
| Linked event(s) |
|
| N4G Summit theme(s) |
|
Measurement
| Key indicator | Proportion of children exclusively breastfed |
|---|---|
| Measurement plan | Collect own data |
| Value | Measurement date | |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 61% | 2014 |
| Target | 75% | December 2025 |
Progress
| Value | Measurement date | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Progress report | 60% | July 2022 |
Off Course
The reported progress indicates that the expected level thus far had not yet been achieved and is not expected to be achieved by the end date, but as the end date is not yet reached, it could be still be possible to reach and maintain the target level.
|
