Mr Mojeed Alabi, Head, Development Desk, Premium times online newspaper, has charged media practitioners to help advocate on diseases ravaging the country, to reduce their impacts.
He made the call in Maiduguri on Wednesday, at a three-day National Media Dialogue on child-nutrition, with health reporters.
The dialogue was organised by the Child Rights Information Bureau (CRIB) of the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture, in collaboration with UNICEF, for three states in the North-east – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (BAY).
The expert said that the advocacy by media practitioners would stir people in authority to rise up to the challenge and find lasting solutions.
Alabi insisted that the media must be involved because many of the diseases, particularly malnutrition, ravaging the North-east, were public health issues.
Similarly, he added that the media must also be involved in creating a legal framework around these diseases and to also change the attitude of mothers to their children.
“Modern journalism combines story telling with advocacy for maximum impacts, reporting alone cannot solve the problem.
“The media must keep talking through advocacy until the change needed is met, the media must also establish collaboration within themselves to make this advocacy work.
“Partnership is all it takes, the media practitioners must make themselves visible, we must introduce human interest aspects into what we do.
“The media practitioners must see themselves as middlemen who can influence the people at the top as well as impact on the lives of people below,” Alabi stressed.
Alhaji Abdullahi Madi, Deputy State Nutrition Officer, stated that Borno had many interventions in checking the outbreak of diseases in the state.
“We have a community mobilizer who visits homes to check for malnourished children, we have done community sensitisation on this.
“We have a lot of challenges though, such as inadequate funding, much of our funding comes from donor agencies.
“Insecurity is also a big challenge to meet up with our demands,” Madi said.
Mr Ifeanyi Maduanusi, Nutrition Specialist, UNICEF Maiduguri Field office, stated that a lot of interventions had been implemented by his organisation, in collaboration with government and partners, to combat malnutrition in the BAY states.
He said that his organisation had introduced a system/multisectoral approach, life cycle approach, that focused on prevention and treatment, where prevention failed.
Others, he said, were health system, food system, education system, Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) system, as well as social protection system to combat malnutrition in the North-east. (NAN) (www.nannews.ng)
