Nestlé highlights its commitment to breastfeeding
As part of this year’s celebration of World Breastfeeding Week (WBW), Nestlé has stressed its commitment to promoting and supporting breastfeeding to help improve maternal and infant nutrition in Central and West Africa.
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According to the company, which is a nutrition, health and wellness company, it strongly believes that breast milk is the ideal food for newborns and infants.
The theme for this year’s WBW, “Breastfeeding: A Winning Goal For Life!", highlights the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding.
In a release to mark the WBW, it said the company had created a number of initiatives to raise awareness of the importance of right nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life.
This year, the company says it is scaling up its activities on the importance of breastfeeding by proactively engaging with healthcare professionals and employees in the region, as well as supporting the national breastfeeding campaign.
Nutrition education
In Central and West Africa, Nestle indicates that the rate of low exclusive breastfeeding, poor feeding practices and the use of inappropriate supplementary foods in the first two years of life are far too common and can have an adverse effect on the development of children.
To help address these problems, Nestlé said it was focusing its activities and nutrition education on healthcare professionals as part of its commitment to implement nutrition education programmes in order to promote good nutrition practices.
These activities are carried out in collaboration with ministries of health and professional associations and it is one of the company’s 35 pledges outlined in the Nestlé in Society report, “Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2013”, which it aims to fulfil by 2020 or earlier .
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Supplementary foods
To address the issue of inadequate supplementary foods for infants in Central and West Africa, Nestlé is continuously innovating its offerings of fortified, nutritious supplementary food products to help improve the nutritional status of infants and young children.
Within the company, Nestlé is proactively educating, engaging and supporting its employees in Central and West Africa to realise the importance of breastfeeding.
It is offering female employees the opportunity to take maternity leave in line with national legislation, plus additional weeks on top of this.
The company is similarly supporting fathers, offering them paternity leave according to standard national legislation and extra days off.
Nestlé also provides flexible working time and breaks to allow mothers to continue breastfeeding when they return to work.
A number of breastfeeding rooms at some of the company’s offices in the region are already in use.
Engaging fathers
During this year’s World Breastfeeding Week, Nestlé is specifically engaging with its male employees to promote its internal campaign on how fathers can support breastfeeding.
Activities include interactive email campaigns, prize-winning competitions and quizzes, external speaker presentations and discussions.