Walking down the rows of shops in the vibrant Makola market, one of the largest markets in West Africa, I could not miss the hops displaying baby foods and drinks in brightly coloured packaging, small enough to feed a child for a meal and affordable for the busy working mother trying to stretch every cedi.
These brightly coloured tins and sachets promise to “nourish their future”, but behind the shiny packaging lie the troubling reality that many are loaded with sugar and salt and are mainly cereal-based, offering an undiversified diet with little more than empty calories to fuel the growing bodies and brains of Ghana’s children.
As more families rely on commercial complementary foods, are we unknowingly trading our children’s nutrition for convenience and profit?
An optimal infant diet includes exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, followed by the introduction of complementary foods to provide additional nutrients for a rapidly growing child
Six to 23 months is a critical window for physical growth and brain development, during which good nutrition is crucial for success.
Yet in Ghana, only 23 per cent of children aged six to 23 months achieve a minimum diverse diet, indicating that complementary foods are often lacking variety.
Preparing nutritious and diverse meals for your young children can be challenging, both in terms of time and cost.
As more women join the workforce, particularly in urban areas, caregivers increasingly turn to commercial complementary foods as a convenient solution that requires simply adding hot water to make a meal magically appear for their little one.
With the growing availability and affordability of these products, commercial complementary foods have become the preferred choice for many families.
This growing reliance on commercial complementary foods mirrors broader global trends.
Ghana represents a small but expanding segment of the booming global baby food industry valued at over $109 billion in 2024 and projected to grow nearly seven per cent annually.
A growing number of working women professionals, an increasing infant population rate, and innovations in infant products and packaging drive the rising demand.
However, convenience often comes at a cost.
A recent study across five West African countries on the nutritional value of processed complementary foods found that only 16 per cent of the products assessed were nutritionally suitable for young children.
The consumption of empty calories in these products drives both undernutrition and overweight/obesity, putting children at risk of non-communicable diseases in the future.
Many caregivers are also victims of aggressive marketing for these products, which claim superiority in protecting child health and nutrition and promise future success.
Whether you are in a “trotro” heading home from work and listening to a jingle on the radio, or stuck in traffic beside a billboard, you can not miss the smiling faces of healthy-looking babies or the catchy slogans promising strong bones, bright minds or future champions with unmatched athletic skill.
The reality is that many of these products have little potential to meet these claims because they do not meet recommended nutrient compositions and often contain high quantities of added sugar and sodium.
(Khosravi, et al., 2023) Many products on the market are not correctly labelled, and their actual nutritional content differs from the label.
Ghana has legislation to regulate such marketing of infant foods, but monitoring and enforcement of this policy are weak.
Without active monitoring and penalties, manufacturers and distributors continue to mislead caregivers and profit from it while undermining the government’s efforts to protect and promote optimal infant and young child feeding.
Policy landscape
There is room to improve the policy landscape by setting standards for complementary foods and tightening the food labelling laws.
Mexico, for example, instituted front-of-pack nutrition warning labels in 2020 and has demonstrated early success with implementing this initiative.
I continue my walk through the market and notice the shelves heaving with the weight of baby food brands imported from France, the United Kingdom, the United States and more.
The environmental costs of producing and transporting these milk- and cereal-based products across continents are enormous, undermining global efforts to reduce emissions.
Supporting local producers in developing nutritious, climate-friendly complementary foods using locally available produce would advance President Mahama’s vision of transforming Ghana from an import-dependent to an export-driven economy.
This approach benefits children, the planet and Ghana's economy.
Commercially produced complementary foods are not all bad. In fact, it has excellent potential to provide nutrient-dense foods for children whose tiny bellies crave quality over quantity.
However, to achieve this goal, producers must prioritise locally available, diverse produce, climate-friendly production methods and compliance with national standards and regulations.
As I leave the Makola Market with the sun beginning to set, the colourful packages on my mind remind me that the first 1,000 days of life are too important to leave to marketing slogans.
We must protect children's fundamental right to nutrition by prioritising national progress over profits.
It requires a system-wide approach.
The government must set standards and enforce nutrition labelling; local producers must rise to meet them with quality, diverse foods; and, as citizens, we must demand better for our children — not just convenience, but good nutrition.
Happy World Children’s Day
