Bangladesh ranks ‘first in the world’ for breastfeeding

UNB :
In a silver lining in the pandemic era, Bangladesh has ranked first in the world in supporting lactating women.
The World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative (WBTi) has congratulated Bangladesh for having achieved the status of ‘green’ nation, along with Sri Lanka.
Only two countries out of 98 have achieved this status so far. Bangladesh got rank number one by scoring 91.5 out of 100.
This is based on its performance on 10 indicators of policies and programmes the WBTi uses to colour-code and rank countries. In an ascending order of performance, the colour codes are red, yellow, blue and green.
“Bangladesh that scored 91.5/100 earned a green colour code, which implies the best level of performance.
 This has been the result of persistent efforts since 2005 to pursue improvements.
“Bangladesh demonstrated high-level commitment, led by its Prime Minister, towards health and nutrition of mothers and babies,” said Dr Arun Gupta, WBTi’s global coordinator.
Launched in 2004, WBTi assists countries to assess the status of and benchmark the progress in implementation of the Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) in a standard way It is based on the WHO’s tool for national assessment of policy and programmes on infant and young child feeding.
Inadequate breastfeeding costs the global economy almost $1 billion each day. This loss is due to lost productivity and healthcare costs. In addition, it saves 700,000 lives annually.
Breastfeeding majorly benefits child health, women’s health and prevents non-communicable diseases. This can only be achieved through galvanizing national actions to protect, and support every pregnant and lactating woman.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) is actively supporting the breastfeeding actions on a continuous basis and looks for further development of IYCF in Bangladesh.
“In the latest report of 2020, several partners together did this assessment and we scored green code in five out of 10 indicators,” said Dr SK Roy, chairperson of the Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation, who led this effort of assessment.