Week-long awareness campaign highlights benefits of breastfeeding

AMMAN — The Ministry of Health, in partnership with UNICEF and Save the Children Jordan is celebrating World Breastfeeding Week by holding awareness-raising lectures around the Kingdom on “child, pregnant women and lactating women feeding”.

Exclusive breastfeeding is “the best way to give all nutrients to newly born and one of the best methods to ensure health of the child especially in exceptional emergencies”, according to a statement sent to The Jordan Times by the organisers on Sunday.

“After six months of exclusive breastfeeding, induction of solid complementary food in the right portions and quantities is required till the age of two years, to enhance child’s health and well-being,” the statement said.

On the occasion of World Breastfeeding Week, celebrated annually during the first week of August every year, UNICEF Representative to Jordan Robert Jenkins expressed the agency’s commitment to “ensuring that all children are exclusively breastfed and an enabling environment is provided to support mothers in fulfilling their right to breastfeed their children”.

“Breastfeeding is a fundamental right for every child, as stated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” the statement quoted Jenkins as saying.

“I would like to thank the Ministry of Health for their high commitment for child survival. Together, we can ‘Keep our Promise’ towards saving the lives of children and ensuring their optimal growth and development, through the promotion of breastfeeding,” he added.

Manal Wazani, the CEO of Save the Children Jordan, said “the first 1,000 days of the life of the child are the most important... studies show that children who are exclusively breastfed for the first six month have 14 times a better chance to live a better life.”

On the occasion, Save the Children Jordan will conduct awareness lectures, which will go on for one week in all the Kingdom’s regions in parallel to the infant and child nutrition programme launched two years ago in partnership with ministry’s Healthcare Centres and Community Based Organisations in the southern governorates, the statement said. 

The lectures will focus on the benefits of breastfeeding and provision of all liquids and nutrition the child needs in the first six months, and “how it will decrease the possibility of the child becoming sick, and improve health issues such as respiratory tract diseases, diarrhoea, allergy, indigestion [and] constipation”. 

Breastfeeding also helps ensure better mental and physical development of the child and is beneficial to the mother because it minimises the possibility of getting breast and ovarian cancer, according to the statement.