Social Justice
World Breastfeeding Week
- 09 Aug 2019
- 3 min read
The World Breastfeeding Week (WBW) has been observed from 1st to 7th August 2019. The Food and Nutrition Board, Ministry of Women and Child Development, has organized a number of activities on the theme “Empower Parents, Enable Breastfeeding”. The focus is on protection, promotion, and support of breastfeeding.
- The objectives of World Breastfeeding Week are:
- To create awareness among the parents about breastfeeding
- Encourage parents to adopt breastfeeding
- Creating awareness about the importance of initiation and exclusive breastfeeding, and adequate & appropriate complementary feeding
- Providing advocacy material about the importance of breastfeeding
- Importance of Breastfeeding
- It promotes better health for mothers and children alike
- It prevents infections like diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections in early infancy and thus reduce infant mortality
- It decreases the risk of mothers developing breast cancer, ovarian cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease and
- It protects infants from obesity-related illnesses, diabetes and increases the IQ.
MAA - "Mothers Absolute Affection"
- It is a nationwide programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to promote breastfeeding and provision of counselling services for supporting breastfeeding through health systems.
- The programme has been named ‘MAA’ to signify the support a lactating mother requires from family members and at health facilities to breastfeed successfully.
- The following are the objectives of the Programme in order to achieve the above mentioned goal:
- Build an enabling environment for breastfeeding through awareness generation activities, targeting pregnant and lactating mothers, family members and society in order to promote optimal breastfeeding practices.
- Breastfeeding to be positioned as an important intervention for child survival and development.
- Reinforce lactation support services at public health facilities through trained healthcare providers and through skilled community health workers.
- To incentivize and recognize those health facilities that show high rates of breastfeeding along with processes in place for lactation management.
- ‘Vatsalya – Maatri Amrit Kosh’, a National Human Milk Bank and Lactation Counselling Centre has been established at the Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC), Delhi. It has been established in collaboration with the Norwegian government, Oslo University and Norway India Partnership Initiative (NIPI).
