King's Village Nutrition Centre...Where malnourished children find hope

Some mothers and their malnourished kids at the centre

BONTANGA, a tranquil village in the Kumbungu district of the Northern Region, is popular for its irrigation dam, which was established several years ago to irrigate farms within its catchment.

A few kilometres away from this dam is another institution that should equally attract attention, especially from the development community.

It is certainly not a hotel or zoo but a charitable organisation that provides quality education, healthcare, water and sanitation services to the deprived communities in the Tolon and Kumbungu districts. 
Among the services that the King's Village offers, the one that touched me most was the provision of paediatric care and long term rehabilitation for children suffering from severe malnourishment.


 

The King's Village Project, as it is called, was established by Rev Ben Owusu-Sekyere and his wife, Rev Marion Owusu-Sekyere, both of whom settled in Northern Ghana in 1999 having returned from the United Kingdom (UK) to continue with their missionary work.

Rev Ben Owusu Sekyere and Rev Marion Owusu-Sekyere

They initiated this charity project in 2003 with support from the Christian Centre of the Assemblies of God Church based in Nottingham in the UK, which they were affiliated to.

Just before the Christmas break, I visited Bontanga and I could not help but marvel at how God had used these two evangelists to transform the lives of children, women and entire communities.

Under the project, they had succeeded in establishing an educational complex that provides quality education, at virtually no cost, to children from these communities, some of whom walk or ride from villages more than five miles away.

“We pay GH¢10 at the beginning of each term. We are very happy that our children are also receiving quality education and we pray that God supports pastor and his wife,” said Alhassan Adam, a farmer who is the father of a nursery-three pupil, Nuhu Alhassan.

A proud father picking his child at the close of school at the King's Village

In 2005, the couple succeeded in fulfilling another vision of theirs by establishing a medical centre to address the health needs of the people and reduce the incidence of deaths resulting from malaria, cholera and labour-related complications.

“We realized that a number of children were dying from preventable and treatable conditions, like malaria and we felt the need to do something about it,” Rev Owusu-Sekyere said in an interview.

He said they also found out that two-thirds of these communities did not have clean water and sanitation services and so went a step further to drill boreholes and construct household latrines in a number of these communities with funding support from their international donors.

Care for malnourished children

Among the services that the King's Village offers, the one that touched me most was the provision of paediatric care and long term rehabilitation for children suffering from severe malnourishment.

Having witnessed how some children brought to the medical centre were at the point of death as a result of malnourishment, Mr and Mrs Owusu-Sekyere were inspired to set up a special unit to breathe new life into these children.

With funds from two of their volunteers from Nottingham, Mr and Mrs Terry Carpenter, a Nutrition Centre was established less than 100 meters away from the medical centre.

When I got to centre, I was moved by the sight of a skeletal boy sitting on the lap of his mother.

I must confess that I had never seen a severely malnourished child physically, except those I see on television from places like Somalia.

Hadija undressing her son

The boy, Misbawu Mohammed, looked so skinny, frail and dehydrated. Whilst his bulky eyes appeared to be sinking into his skull, his ribs were protruding on his sides.

His mother, 30-year-old Hadija Abu said her son, who was over two years, became sick a year after birth, but they could not tell what was wrong with him.

“He started to have higher temperature and later developed skin rashes all over his body. Later, he lost appetite and his situation grew from bad to worse until we came here,” she narrated.

Sitting next to them was another young mother, Awabu Mahamudu and her emaciated four-year old daughter, Amina Issah.

“She has been sick since birth and in spite of all that we did, her condition never improved,” 36-year old Awabu said.

Both mothers however maintained that the health of their children had begun to improve since they arrived at the centre a few weeks back.

“They were worse than what you are seeing. Now they eat better and are gaining weight,” Hadija said.

The Nutrition Officer in charge of the centre, Mr Norma Abudu Birresborn said children brought to the centre mostly suffer from three main conditions: kwashiorkor, marasmus and marasmus kwashiorkor.

These conditions, he explained, indicate low levels of protein and energy in these children, adding that children with these conditions are thin and have bloated stomachs and yellowish sparse hair, among others.

“When they arrive, they are usually in a precarious state and so the first thing we do is to stabilize them, such as normalizing their temperature and treating any infections,” Mr Birresborn indicated.

He said during the rehabilitation phase, the children are given medication, nutritional meals and some food supplements.

Attached to the Nutrition Centre is a traditional-styled compound house with ten rooms where children admitted to the centre stay with their mothers or caregivers during the rehabilitation stage.

Inside the compound, I saw a middle-aged woman drying corn and pepper, whilst two healthy-looking children were playing ‘catch me if you can.’

The woman, Mma Sakina Yakubu told me that she was the caretaker of the two children, Fuseina and Alhassan, who are twins and that they were brought to the centre in the early days of its operation, but had now recovered successfully.

“Both of them are in class three at the school,” she said.

The bigger picture

Malnutrition remains one of the threats to the country's efforts to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on reducing child mortality (goal four) and eradicating extreme poverty and hunger (goal one).

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), malnutrition occurs “when a person is not getting enough food” and that “even if people get enough to eat, they will become malnourished if the food they eat does not provide the proper amounts of micronutrients - vitamins and minerals - to meet daily nutritional requirements.”

The United Nation's Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) claims that malnutrition is the largest single contributor to disease and that it also affects the mental and physical development of children.

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) recently painted a grim picture about the state of malnutrition among Ghanaian children when it revealed that 12,000 children in Ghana die every year of ailments due to malnutrition.

The Deputy Chief Nutrition Officer at the GHS, Mrs Esi Amoaful, who made this disclosure, further indicated that “one out of every thirteen children in Ghana die before their fifth birthday mostly as a result of under-nutrition.”

She mentioned the Northern, Upper East, Central, Western and Eastern regions as the most affected regions.

Mma Sakina and Fuseina

The Northern Regional Director of Health, Dr Akwasi Twumasi confirmed that the region had a high rate of malnutrition, but indicated that cases of acute malnutrition had reduced from 21 per cent in 2011 to 18.3 per cent in 2012.

He attributed this downward trend to a number of interventions implemented by the GHS in partnership with its development partners, such as the supply of supplementary drugs to children.

The Northern Region was one of the regions that benefitted from the Nutrition and Malaria Control for Child Survival Project (NMCCSP), a five-year World Bank-funded project that sought to strengthen community-based health and nutrition services for pregnant women and children under the age of two.

One unique component of the project, which spanned 2007-2012, was the promotion of indigenous meals prepared with ingredients, like moringa, beans, agushi, smoked fish and spinach.

The Programme Manager of this project, Mrs Hannah Adjei told the Daily Graphic that local foods contained the recommended combination of nutrients needed to support the growth of children.

Indeed, the King's Village Nutrition Centre as part of its services trains caregivers in how to prepare nutritious local meals for their children, particularly those affected by malnutrition.

“We train them in the preparation of ‘winimix’, which is made from corn, soya bean, groundnut and millet,” the Nutrition Officer stated.

One thing that remains significant is that the King’s Village Nutrition Centre is as important to the deprived villages of Tolon and Kumbungu as water is to the people in the desert.

It can however continue to offer these life-saving services if it gets the needed partnership and funding support from the government, philanthropists and donor agencies.
(This article was also published in the Daily Graphic, Jan 29, 2013, page 40-41)