Film targets Cameroon’s malnutrition scourge

A new film has turned the spotlight on Cameroon’s worrying problem of rampant child malnutrition.

In hospitals across northern Cameroon, specially designated wards for malnorished patients are often filled with children too sick to even breathe.

Famished, malnourished and drained of any strength, there are some of the country’s worst shames – a culmination of ignorance, grim poverty and a broken child care system; a paradox of inexplicable suffering amidst plenty.

Rampant child malnutrition is such a big problem that aid organisations like the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) – which has been helping the ministry of health to detect and treat cases – have spent years and huge resources combating it but results have seemed slow to come.

Last year alone, health workers, often aided by community volunteers, diagnosed more than 178,100 malnourished children in the Far North, North, Adamawa and the Far North regions, which are the worst affected parts of the country.

Across the country, retarded growth, a consequence of malnutrition in the first two years of a child, affects more than a million children under the age of five. That is a staggering one in three children.

The pathology, in all its different forms, affects “too many” children in Cameroon, says Felicite Tchibindat, the resident representative of UNICEF in Cameroon.

A new fictional work by award-winning filmmaker Bassek ba Kobhio that premiered in Yaounde on Thursday is one of the latest uses of innovative approaches to combat the problem.

“Africa is a viewing and listening population,” says ba Kobhio. “When you make a film, people can watch and listen. If you ask them to read, they will not.”

'Every child is a prince' rips apart cultural stereotypes that prevent pregnant women and children from eating properly and makes a case for simple, cost effective and lifesaving nutritional actions that even the poorest in society can adopt.

“You do not need to have money or a lot to fight malnutrition,” says ba Kobhio.

Yet, it is a problem ministry of health officials say is doing as much damage as other better-known and better-funded public health emergencies like malaria and AIDS.

By some estimates, Cameroon has more malnourished children than every other country in Central Africa even though it has the strongest economy in the sub-region.

Most of the afflicted children will live with the consequence of the problem, some of which are irreversible, for the rest of their lives, says Tchibindat.

Chronically malnourished children, for example, are believed to be 4.6 times more likely to die from diarrhoea and 3.5 times from pneumonia than a children who are not.

Malnourished children are also two to three times more likely to fall sick, miss two to three years of education and lose up to 45 per cent of their personal economic potential.

The girl child faces additional difficulties, running the risk of giving birth to an underweight child in adulthood and thereby becoming a vector of trans-generational transmission of malnutrition. “Poor nutrition perpetuates a cycle of poverty,” says Tchibindat.

It reduces the productive capacity of victim in later life, increases healthcare spending and reduces their chances of attaining higher levels of education and by extension good-paying jobs.

In Cameroon, the government estimates that malnutrition leads to economic losses of up to 3% of GDP or more than CFA 340 billion annually.

The ministry of health and UNICEF hope that ba Kobhio’s new film will produce the kind of mentality change and stakeholder mobilisation needed to reverse the situation.

'Every child is a prince' was shot in French and translated into widely spoken local languages like Pidgin and Fufulde. It will be aired on selected television channels and screened in communities.

“Public understanding and awareness of the problem is vital [in combating malnutrition],” says Tchibindat.

Far from being a rural problem, malnutrition affects nearly every segment of the Cameroon population, including those often described as rich and urban.

A health and demographic survey in 2011 showed that seven of the country’s ten regions had a prevalence of chronic malnutrition of more than 30%.

“Even if it’s a problem that is more rampant among the rural and poor, it is an ill that affects the entire economy and social development of the country,” says Tchibindat. But can a movie be enough to erode entrenched dietary practices and incite needed action?

“The images and sounds of the Cameroonian society make it possible to tackle the subject of malnutrition in a practical way since it coveys emotion,” says Tchibindat.

“Public information is more direct and this kind of film develops a critical perception as well as builds collective consciousness.”

Every child is a prince features children, some of them victims of malnutrition themselves. But it was mainly written for the adult segment of the population, says ba Kobhio.

“If you want to tackle child malnutrition, you need to target those in charge those children and that is the parents.”

It is parents that take the decision about what children eat, he says and the right choices can result in even the poorest families that depend entirely on their fields to begin “eating food that make young boys and girls grow properly.”