14 Mar 2018

Chairperson of Ghanzi East Sub -council, Mr Dichaba Thupe says his region is struggling with malnutrition which stands at 13 per cent against the national target of three per cent.

Speaking during the sub council meeting on Tuesday, Mr Thupe said they had conducted mobile outreaches for hard to reach areas, but the exercise still proved difficult given limited resources.

He said as a result, the outreach had decreased from previous fiscal year performance of 29 per cent to 25 per cent average annual performance.

“The funds for direct feeding, which we believed will have been helpful have depleted since February 2017,” he said.

Currently, Mr Thupe said they were in consultation with United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund to find ways of addressing the malnutrition challenge.

He said they were still facing a challenge of non-institutional deliveries. We are experiencing an alarming rate of home deliveries, with recording of 144 non institutional births by end of the third quarter,” he said.

The chairperson regretted though that home deliveries were risky, but some part of community still preferred home deliveries thereby calling for all pregnancies to be registered at health facilities.

Mr Thupe said the Department of Civil and National registration has decided to replace and remove the XX/XX in the identity documents of persons whose date birth were unknown.

“This endeavor will ensure proper recording of dates of birth and will be replaced with 01/01 where dates of births are unknown,” he stated.

Regarding reception classes, he said they managed to open total of 11 reception classes in schools in his region, except at Kgaphamadi and Qabo primary school as the two schools have no available classrooms. Ends