HEALTH-CAMEROON: Malnutrition, Disease Stunt Children’s Growth

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sylvestre Tetchiada

YAOUNDE, Sep 8 2003 (IPS) - Cameroon is not known for the famine and drought that devastate much of Africa each year. Blessed with abundant rainfall, it is part of the equatorial forest where surplus food is always produced.

The problem, as Jacques Boyer, coordinator of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Cameroon, recently found out has to do with the lack of balanced diet and poverty.

”Some 54.1 percent of Cameroon’s children have stunted growth because of malnutrition,” he said.

"Malnutrition causes stunted growth and emaciation which makes malnourished children vulnerable to all sorts of illnesses,” Boyer added.

A conference, titled An Integrated Plan for Early Child Development held in Cameroon late August, warned that the current level of malnutrition runs contrary to the hopes raised 13 years ago at the World Summit for Children in New York.

”Besides poverty, malnutrition strikes more than one in five children in Cameroon, and threatens the development of their intellectual and physical capabilities, not to mention their survival,” Boyer added.

Malaria, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition are the main causes of infant mortality, which account for 77 percent of all child diseases in Cameroon, according to the Ministry of Health and UNICEF.

The problems facing Cameroonean children have yet to be overcome, including the failure to reduce by half the 1990 rate of malnutrition among children under five. With 16 percent of newborns weighing less than 2,500 grammes in 1991, the goal was to reduce the rate to eight percent by the beginning of 2000.

Malaria is also responsible for 35 to 40 percent of hospital deaths, 50 percent of morbidity among children under five and 40 percent of child mortality. The deaths account for ”an annual loss of 1.3 percent in Cameroon’s Gross Domestic Product, whose growth may remain stalled at five percent in 2003”, according to Dr. Helene Mambu-ma Disu, a representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Cameroon.

The government has launched ”Roll Back Malaria” initiative, contained in its five-year ”Strategic National Plan Against Malaria”, at the cost of 39.5 billion CFA (about 68 million U.S. dollars).

Adopted in Apr. 2002, the objective was to ensure that 60 percent of all children under five would be sleeping under insecticide-coated mosquito net by 2006. ”It is a challenge to improve the welfare of Cameroonian children,” Alim Hayatou, a junior minister in the Ministry of Health, told IPS.

By Mar. 21, 2003, Cameroon had 210,000 children orphaned by AIDS.

Cameroon has 15.5 million people, one million of whom are HIV-positive. The national rate of prevalence is around 12 percent.

The AIDS pandemic is further compounded by the fact that many children do odd jobs or serve as ”sex bait” for tourists. This is despite the fact that Cameroonian law bars children under the age of 14 from working.

A 2003 survey, conducted by the Ministry of Economy and Finance in conjunction with UNICEF, shows that five percent of children between the ages of five and 14 have performed unremunerated work.

Some children are forced to cook, do shopping, clean, wash clothes, or fetch water. Seven out of ten children perform these tasks for about four hours a day, whereas 11 percent devote more than four hours. Thirteen percent of small girls perform similar jobs compared to nine percent of their male counterparts.

The unlucky ones often end up in prison. "Most children in prisons do not benefit from the measures adopted to prevent their abuse,” says Pierre Fankam of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

”In Cameroon’s 19 largest prisons during 2002, there were 393 minors, 341 of whom were in preventive detention and 54 of whom were serving time after being sentenced,” says Grace Elimbi of the Cameroonian Association of Women Jurists.

These figures do not include those children placed by the judicial system in re-education centres, nor those remanded to the custody of their families.