Bangsamoro 'nutrition plan' launched

COTABATO CITY — Officials launched the Bangsamoro Regional Plan of Action for Nutrition, a framework for addressing malnutrition issues besetting the autonomous region, in a symbolic rite in Cotabato City on Monday, October 28.

The Regional Plan of Action for Nutrition, or RPAN, was drafted by officials of the Regional Nutrition Council-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the Ministry of Health-BARMM and planners from cooperating agencies in the region.

BARMM’s health minister, the physician-ophthalmologist Kadil Monera Sinolinding Jr., led Monday’s launch of the RPAN that outlines measures the regional government shall pursue to address malnutrition that has noticeably been causing stunting of growth of children in far-flung areas in the autonomous region.

Sinolinding told reporters that the RPAN will boost the joint efforts of MoH-BARMM and the office of the region’s chief minister, Ahod Ebrahim, in addressing malnutrition in all of the region’s five provinces and three cities.

In 2015, during the time of the now defunct Autonomous Region Muslim Mindanao that covered the provinces now under BARMM, there was a 45.2% malnutrition rate in the local communities. 

Records obtained from MoH-BARMM’s field offices and the Ministry of Social Services and Development indicate that 240,239 children in the autonomous region have recovered from malnutrition since 2021, many of them in areas made poor by decades of secessionist strife.

Sinolinding said the malnutrition rate in BARMM had been lowered to only 36 percent by 2021, or three years after the then 27-year ARMM got replaced with a more administratively empowered BARMM, a product of the national government’s 22-year peace overture with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Sinolinding said the RPAN shall guide health workers in BARMM on how to efficiently carry out the regional government's anti-malnutrition campaign in the autonomous region.