Missions Minded Mondays

        Mondays are all about missions. Today I want to focus on MANA. Mother Administered Nutritive Aid is an organization focused on the nutrition of children all around the world. Here are some facts from their website (www.mananutrition.org) :

A child dies every six seconds from
malnutrition-related causes.

It’s preventable. And it’s curable.

There are about a billion hungry people in the world. Hunger gives way to chronic malnutrition, and in its most severe form, severe acute malnutrition kills 1- 2 million kids a year.
THE CYCLE OF MALNUTRITION

• A child becomes acutely malnourished and the mother must leave what little livelihood she has – typically farming – to take the child to the nearest hospital.
• Long walks give way to crowded waits in makeshift centers. If admitted, she remains as the caregiver in a crowded malnutrition ward, which is often a room with rows of straw mats, as the child is treated.
• Disease is transmitted easily between the weakened children in the ward.
• And if the child survives and returns home, it is often to siblings and other family members who have sunken into a deeper level of crisis.

     MANA offers a treatment called RUTF. Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food.

A six-week supply of MANA* brings a malnourished toddler back from the edge. Usually, for good.

Several years ago in Africa, a fortified peanut butter product – Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) –  was developed that significantly reduces the number of deaths resulting from severe acute malnutrition.
The development of this RUTF is a game changer.

• Field doctors prescribe and distribute it.
• Mothers can take it back home to administer it, away from the disease in the hunger ward.
• Malnourished children digest and process it better than grains.
• Back home quickly, a mother can provide for her other children as she nurses her weakened child back to health.

This community-based approach using RUTF such as MANA will  prevent the deaths of millions of children, worldwide.
Best of all, studies show that once a child is brought back with a full course of RUTF, they stay strong enough to avoid a relapse into severe acute malnutrition. In 2007, RUTF was endorsed as the standard of treatment worldwide for severe acute malnutrition by UNICEF, WHO, WFP, and the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition.

       MANAs goal is that one day, no child will starve to death.

image from www.mananutrition.org

Millions of children who will die of severe acute malnutrition could be saved if each only had 6 weeks’ worth of MANA.  The total cost is less than $60 per child.  That’s it.  Is a child’s life worth $60?
We believe in the universal, cross-cultural truth that mothers love their children.  If we empower moms to treat their malnourished children with ready to use food, lives will be saved.

We can do this.