Rehema Idriss Mzimbiri
Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre, Tanzania
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Nutr Food Sci
In Tanzania, a number of under-five children who are malnourished in all forms of under-nutrition are still huge, despite of many interventions done. It is reported that 2,700,000 (34.4%) are stunted; 340,000 (13.7%) had moderate acute malnutrition and 106,000 (4.3%) had severe acute malnutrition (TDHS, 2015/16/). This is a major achievement of the implementation of Accelerated Nutrition Improvements (ANI) in year 2013-2016 that was in-line with National Nutrition Strategy (20132018) compared to pre-ANI (TDHS, 2010). ANI focused on stronger nutrition surveillance within the health system that ensured better detection and management of child under-nutrition, scaling up social and behavior change communication at community level that improved maternal, infant young and adolescents child feeding practices and increase investments for nutrition at district level when capacity was developed for multi-sectoral planning and budgeting. ANI helped to strengthen health management information system including development of multisectroral nutrition scorecard, capacity building to health care providers, development and use of SBCC materials and improvement of nutrition status of under-five children. Scale-up of nutrition activities led to strong community mobilization around nutrition activities, increased maternal knowledge of determinants and improve positively all forms of child malnutrition. This paper aims at describing the experience of Tanzania (sub-Saharan Africa country) on ANI. The knowledge experiences sharing on clinical nutrition will add value to the Tanzanians� future strategies on nutrition implementation plan.
Rehema Idriss Mzimbiri is currently working at Tanzania Food and Nutrition Centre, Tanzania. She has her expertise in research and training on human nutrition and food sciences including food quality and safety for improving the health and well beings of the rural and urban people. She has 10 years’ experience on food and nutrition activities in Tanzania as well as her research experience on food quality and safety conducted in Beijing, China, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science and exchange programs on Humanitarian Assistance in Belgium and Netherland attract many stakeholders in different ways of focusing on improving human livelihood. She has published more than 4 papers, chapter of the book and one patent.
