Academy for Educational Development

Exclusive Breastfeeding Improves Infants' Health
Festival Recognizes Improvements in Ghana's Breastfeeding Practices

Save 1.3 million lives each year: promote exclusive breastfeeding. 

That was the slogan of this year’s World Breastfeeding Week, seven days devoted to encouraging mothers to breastfeed their babies.

A traditional birth attendent encourages a mother to breastfeed her infant. AED trained healthcare workers in Ghana about the benefits of early breastfeeding.

In Walewale, in the Northern Region of Ghana, the week was marked with a special festival featuring prominent government leaders including the regional health director and district assembly members. Community members, representatives from AED’s LINKAGES project and their partners were also in attendance.

The August 12th festival highlighted the strides the LINKAGES project has made in increasing exclusive breastfeeding rates in the area during its five years there. The most recent report indicates that the rate of exclusive breastfeeding increased from 68 percent in 2000 to 79 in the year 2003.

To be sure, AED and its partners faced considerable challenges when they launched their campaign. “People had said it couldn’t be done,” said Joan Schubert, the behavior change communication coordinator for the LINKAGES project, and the former LINKAGES resident advisor in Ghana, in her speech before the festival. “They thought we were dreaming.”

Throwing away colostrum, the highly nutritious first milk a mother produces, was a common practice in Ghana. And many mothers gave their infants water to drink in addition to their breast milk. This is particularly dangerous because often the water is contaminated with bacteria that can lead to serious childhood illnesses.

When mothers breastfeed together, the support for the behavior increases in the community. AED worked to make exclusive breastfeeding commonplace in Ghana.

Research has shown that exclusive breastfeeding, that is, giving infants nothing to eat other than breastmilk for their first six months, reduces diarrhea and pneumonia and other life-threatening infections.

“Together [AED and its partners] proved them all wrong,” Schubert said. “People understood and believed our message.”

Partnerships in the area were key to making the program a success, said Victoria Quinn, LINKAGES’ Technical Manager for Country Programs. “We needed to reach as many people in as many different ways as we could,” she said. “The best way to do that was to find a whole host of different partners.”

The partners ranged from non-governmental organizations that worked in nutrition, to the Ghana Red Cross Society. Local radio stations also joined the effort and aired quiz shows and dramas about the importance of exclusive breastfeeding.

In addition, LINKAGES created a pre-service program for instructors at 51 different training institutions in all ten regions of the country. “Because of this, students of medicine, nursing, midwifery, public health and hygiene are now being taught and applying the most up-to-date and practical information available … on infant and young child feeding,” Schubert said.

That kind of participation from both AED’s partners and the health community was critical in ensuring the continued success of the program as well.

The LINKAGES project will leave Ghana in September of this year, but the work being done there won’t stop, Schubert said. “Not only the present, but also the future of improved nutrition for ALL in Ghana is well on its way.”