Health and Nutrition

We concentrate on two of the root causes of extreme poverty in the communities where we work in Ghana: nutrition and health. We work to resolve this issue.

Children and their mothers run the danger of not getting the nutrients they need to thrive because of inadequate food intake, ignorance of good nutrition for pregnant women, and improper feeding techniques for infants and early children. This is made worse by a lack of trained medical professionals and cultural norms that frequently prevent women from accessing high-quality prenatal care.

About 70 babies lose their lives every day.

This is mainly due to premature birth, infections, and complications during and after delivery. In spite of the availability of skilled antenatal care and birth attendants at health facilities during delivery, newborn and maternal deaths remain high.

In Ghana, one out of every five infants has stunted growth during the first 1000 days of life due to malnutrition, frequent illness, and an unhealthful environment. Children’s physical, social, and cognitive development is impacted by these factors. Their brain development suffers, which has an adverse effect on early learning, academic achievement, and eventually their socioeconomic growth.

What we want to do:

We want to see all children under the age of 5 and all women of childbearing age enjoy better access to health care and appropriate nutrition. We are working towards this by:

• Increasing the number of children who are protected from disease
• increasing the number of children who are well-nourished
• Ensuring children and their caregivers have access to essential health services

Lineenbaal Women’s Association (LiWA) is working with partners at the local level to implement interventions that are working for the survival of newborns. These low-cost but efficient techniques involve having mothers wrap their premature babies’ chests with a piece of cloth. Close body contact with the mother has been shown to help stabilize a baby’s body temperature, keep heart rates steady, make breathing easier, and is also conducive to breastfeeding.

Lineenbaal Women’s Association (LiWA) is working with partners at the local level to implement interventions that are working for the survival of newborns. These low-cost but efficient techniques involve having mothers wrap their premature babies’ chests with a piece of cloth. Close body contact with the mother has been shown to help stabilize a baby’s body temperature, keep heart rates steady, make breathing easier, and is also conducive to breastfeeding.

Lineenbaal Women’s Association (LiWA) works with community health nurses to enable them to provide support to mothers from the time they register their pregnancy until after childbirth, initiating breastfeeding within the first hour, providing newborn care, vaccination, and post-natal check-ups, and monitoring the growth of the child.