THE Zimbabwe Civil Society Organisations Nutrition Alliance (ZCOSUNA) alongside the Rural Enterprise Trust of Zimbabwe aims to nurture 50 school children as nutrition advocates.
By Kudakwashe Pembere
The Rural Enterprise Trust of Zimbabwe a member of ZCOSUNA took nutrition advocacy to Kuwadzana district schools namely Presbyterian College and Corpus Christ High School.
In Harare, this program was taken to Churchhill Boys High School. RETZ head of programs Cuthbert Mukora giving the background of this initiative said since 2017, they trained junior parliamentarians and junior councilors.
Previously we have been doing our project of engaging children specifically those who are members of the junior parliament as well as junior councilors.
“So from the project, we were engaging them in nutrition advocacy or in calling up on government and all stakeholders to consider investing more resources in nutrition given that they are victims and most affected by malnutrition,” he said.
Added Mukora, “Most of the interventions as CSO we did had no children involvement in participating on issues to scale up nutrition. From the project since 2017,we been engaging the Junior parliamentarians training them and mentoring them. From our activities, two have managed to get global and regional exposure getting awards, traveling and attending global nutrition conferences.”
He said they are looking to capacitate 50 pupils in nutrition advocacy.
“Now we have only two nutrition advocates. from the nutrition advocates that we have we want to increase the number up to 50 who will be calling up on all stakeholders including government in scaling up nutrition issues. We are trying to recruit more nutrition advocates to participate in nutrition issues,” said Mukora.
Now scaling up this initiative in Harare, it was piloted in Mashonaland Central.
“We have visited a lot of schools. It’s not only Kuwadzana. We are also doing it in Bindura. In rural Bindura we have engaged more than 22 schools. In Mazowe we have engaged more than 25 schools. “We are also engaging more schools even here in Harare. We have been training junior councilors to be citizen journalists writing stories on food and nutrition and report on these issues. We have training teachers to learn on these issues, digital security and fact checking,” he said.
He added that the interest generated through this initiative has been inspiring.
“We have learnt from these children their keenness in learning and pushing for nutrition but lacked information and capacitation,”said Mukora.
