KARACHI, Sept 23: Speakers at a symposium on Monday stressed the need for initiating more childhood care and development programmes in the country so that subsequent health problems of children could be prevented.
The two-day symposium, titled “Early childhood care and development”, began at the Aga Khan University auditorium which was filled to capacity.
The Sindh governor, who was chief guest at the inaugural session, underlined the need for starting more public-private partnership programmes, like the Tawana Pakistan Project, a partnership programme between the government and the Aga Khan University.
He added that the President had recently formed the human development commission to not only review, but also address the situation through partnership programmes.
Quoting figures put forward by the World Health Organization, he said that in countries like Pakistan at least one-third of children below five years did not reach their full growth potential. “Maternal malnutrition is so prevalent that UNICEF estimates that Pakistan has one of the highest rates of low birth-weight babies amongst all the developing countries,” he said.
The keynote lecture was delivered by Dr J. Fraser Mustard, founding president and fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The lecture was titled “Best investment for the future: experience based brain development - the effects on health, learning and behaviour.”
Dr Mustard said there was now a growing body of evidence that brain development in the early years influenced performance in the formal school system and the level of education attained. “Although there is some evidence that special programmes for children who have had a poor start can help overcome the odds, the gains are never what could be achieved if the children had a high quality early period of development.
All of this evidence indicates that programmes that enhance early childhood development are a fundamental investment to ensure a healthy, competent population that can cope with and contribute to the changes societies face today. In the world of investment, investing in quality childhood development and parenting programmes is as important to society as investments in bridges, power stations and dams.”
He added that in view of this evidence it was not surprising that epidemiological studies of populations showed a strong correlation between literacy and health and literacy and behaviour. “One of the reasons for this is that many of the brain pathways are connected with each other and are most plastic in terms of development during the early years of life.”
In the first scientific session, Dr Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, the Husein Laljee Dewraj professor of paediatrics, Aga Khan University, read out his paper titled “Optimizing maternal and feotal nutrition: best investment for the future.”
He said that despite advances on many fronts, Pakistan had made woefully little progress in its human development indicators and now ranked by the UNDP at a lamentable 127/162 states for the human development index. “This poor progress in its HDI is directly related to a lack of investment in health, education and social development by successive governments.”
Dr Mushtaq Khan, director of the Centre for Research on Poverty Reduction and Income Distribution, planning division, said that the latest figures available from the national nutrition survey indicated that about 10-15 per cent of the pre- schoolers suffered from moderate to severe malnutrition while 40 per cent were underweight. “Breastfeeding is quite common but supplemental foods are started at a rather late stage and is usually not given.”
The second scientific session comprised two papers, one by Dr Jim Irvine, planning coordinator of the human development programme of the AKU, and the other by Dr Arshad Hussain, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia.
According to Dr Irvine’s paper, titled “Best investment for the future: the high cost of low-quality education”, for families with limited resources, the opportunity costs and real costs of educating their adolescent children are very high.
“If they perceive schooling to be inefficient, irrelevant or unlikely to enhance earning opportunities, their children may be forced to drop out, without acquiring functional levels of literacy or numeracy as tools for their continued self- education.” Dr Hussain’s paper focussed on the child mental health.
An exhibition of scientific products and posters was in progress during the symposium.