ABUJA, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Forty-nine percent of children under the age of five in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, are malnourished and do not grow well, said the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Thursday.
In a statement reaching Xinhua in Abuja, the UN agency said such children are either overweight or stunted, noting that malnutrition remained a major public health and development concern in Nigeria.
The malnutrition level in the country, UNICEF said, should be tackled while appealing to the federal government, private sector, donors, parents, families, and businesses to help children grow well.
Among other measures, it said investing more resources in interventions aimed at preventing malnutrition among young children and supporting treatment when prevention fails, supporting nursing mothers to adequately feed and care for their children, would improve the situation.
The global agency said healthy food environments for children and adolescents should be built by using proven approaches such as accurate and easy-to-understand labelling and stronger controls on marketing unhealthy foods.
Supportive systems on health, water, sanitation, education, and social protection should be mobilized to scale up nutrition results for all children, it added.
