"This month, we are planning to launch the Healthy Children Movement aiming at 50 districts and cities, with stunting cases that need special attention," Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin remarked after attending the Stunting Coordination Meeting at the Jakarta City Hall, Monday.
Sadikin noted that the districts and cities are spread across the five provinces of West Java, Central Java, East Java, Banten, and North Sumatra, with the highest number of stunting cases and account for 51 percent of the case count nationwide.
Sadikin stated that the movement will involve all components of society, starting from relevant ministries and agencies, local government, private sector, and communities to families, to ensure that stunting interventions are not misguided.
The main goal of this movement is to prevent children from experiencing stunting due to a lack of balanced nutrition, he remarked.
According to the minister, the most important factor in handling stunting is to ensure sufficient intake of animal protein in children.
"The most important thing is ensuring the food gets into the child's mouth. That is hard to control since it is the most difficult. We need the community's involvement, just like vaccination," he remarked.
The minister explained that the movement was a response to the Indonesian Nutrition Status Survey (SSGI) Program launched by the government in early 2023 by setting intervention targets in each region.
Sadikin noted that Jakarta will be the starting point for the Healthy Children Movement, with 798,107 toddlers prone to malnutrition in the area.
"We agreed that the data would be made transparent, and the weighing would be carried out for all toddlers. There are many regions that have not weighed their toddlers. Jakarta is the most ready and committed to weighing the 798 thousand toddlers," he stated.
The minister noted that the weighing will show which toddlers are at risk of malnutrition and are in need of animal protein, such as fish, eggs, and meat.
His side also encourages collaboration with the private sector to fund these interventions through the role of foster parents.
Meanwhile, community participation is deemed necessary to ensure balanced nutritional intake and animal protein foods are fed to the targeted toddlers, he stated.
"The most difficult task is to make sure that once we help, we need to know whether the food has been consumed or not. We need the community's participation to ensure that," he emphasized.
The Health Ministry's SSGI indicated that stunting prevalence in Indonesia has decreased, from 24.4 percent in 2021 to 21.6 percent in 2022. However, this number still needs to be reduced to 14 percent in 2024 in accordance with the National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN).
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Translator: Andi Firdaus/Siti N, Resinta S
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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