Sundaymail Editor
Emmanuel Kafe
Government and a local non-governmental organisation – the Zimbabwe Civil Society Organisations Scaling Up Nutrition Alliance (ZCSOSUNA) – have launched a youth-led advocacy project targeting six districts in the country to empower adolescent learners to promote consumption of natural foods.
The programme, which aims to upscale the National School Feeding Programme to secondary schools across Zimbabwe, is being supported by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, the Ministry of Health and Child Care, as well as the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef).
Head of programming for Rural Enterprise Trust of Zimbabwe (RETZ), Mr Cuthbert Mukora, who also represents ZCSOSUNA, said their expectation is to see increased lobbying on adolescent nutrition.
“We hope this initiative will play a crucial role in transforming school environments, and with the emergence of malnutrition among adolescents in many nations across the globe, it is high time we pay attention to the nutrition needs of this age group,” he said.
“The State of the World’s Children’s Report of 2019 highlighted that just under half of the adolescents (46 percent) consume fast food at least once a week and half of adolescent girls in low income and rural settings eat fewer than three meals a day, with most missing or skipping breakfast.”
A monotonous diet, he added, is not only unhealthy for humans, but is “also unhealthy for the planet because it can result in monocultures and a loss of biodiversity”.
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