Nairobi — The next generation of Kenyans will be shorter, less intelligent, less productive and hardly capable of sustaining the country’s dream of a prosperous nation within the Vision 2030. Already a third of the children under five, translating to some 2.3 million, are stunted and perform poorly in school and even as adults, will be less productive. This will worsen in the next nine years. Stunted children may never regain the height lost as a result of the condition and most will never gain the corresponding body weight. It also leads to premature death because vital organs never fully develop during childhood. A new report by Unicef ranks Kenya at position 16 in the world and eighth in Africa, as one of the countries facing severe stunting among children under the age of five years. The study, which was conducted over a five-year period from 2003, says the country has a 35 per cent stunting prevalence, which translates to about 2.3 million children under the age of five years affected by poor nutrition. This means one in every three children celebrating their second birthday is stunted, raising concerns over future productivity for this generation, upon reaching adulthood just a few years before 2030. These children will hardly benefit from the free education programme because they enrol late, are always absent and have poor learning skills. Studies show that national productivity based on a people’s physical labour declines significantly for every one per cent reduction in adult height resulting from poor nutrition. While this is the case, the report says that if current levels remain unchanged, loss in productivity due to stunting alone could cost Kenya some Sh80 billion a year. It says Kenya is sharing 1.2 per cent of the global burden and that poor households are raising a bigger share of the stunted generation compared to middle income and rich households. According to the report, stunting, which is defined as a condition where a child is too short for his or her age, is likely to be accompanied by other deficiencies leading to underweight and wasted children. A child who is said to exhibit a wasted deficiency weighs lower compared to his or her age, while an underweight child has low weight compared to his or her age bracket. Unicef’s chief, at the nutrition section, Ms Noreen Prendiville, says Kenya is currently facing severe under nutrition especially in the arid and semi-arid areas, and could be the reason stunted children are on the rise. According to her, children who are undernourished are likely to show a life-long negative impact on their brain structure and function, a situation that science links to mental retardation. A section of the report says stunted children often post poor performances in school, heralding reduced productivity upon attaining adulthood, hence the mushrooming of low income households. At the same time, studies show that children from communities facing a deficiency in iodine can lose up to 13.5 of their Intelligence Quotient (IQ) points on average, compared to those from communities that are non deficient. But it is the possibility that mothers are failing to breastfeed their children that is sending alarming signals about the future of the nation. According to the report which was tracking progress on child and maternal nutrition in the world, less than three per cent of babies in Kenya are exclusively breastfed during the first six months. Data shows that Kenyan mothers are likely to stop breastfeeding children early denying them micro-nutrients such as vitamin A, iodine and iron, which science says are abundant in breast milk. “We are seeing a situation where mothers are not having flexible time to breastfeed due to economic challenges,” says Ms Pendiville. “The result will be a future generation that is not productive.” According to the report, poor breastfeeding causes 10,000 infant deaths every year, while both vitamin A deficiency and underweight children will each account for 300,000 deaths in nine years. The effects of malnutrition have already been felt as the country grappled with delayed enrolment in schools as well as absenteeism and poor learning ability among affected children. At the same time, iodine deficiency, which has been noted in 24.9 per cent of malnourished children, will lead to over 80,000 children being born with varying degrees of retardation every year. Thus in 20 years, the country could be faced with a weakened labour pool due to a generation that has not been well fed. By economic standards analysed in the report, the country stands to lose more than Sh200 billion in GDP by the year 2015, while the figure is expected to double by the year 2030, if the government does not address the nutrition situation. While launching a report that sought more commitment to address the vitamin and mineral deficiencies in September, Public Health and Sanitation Minister, Beth Mugo, said deficiencies were having a profound effect. “In our food crisis, it is the most vulnerable who will feel the effects of not having enough nutritional food to eat,” she said. But, only 0.4 per cent of resources allocated to the health sector budget went to nutrition, according to the 2009/10 Budget.

Source: Daily Nation

Shujaaz, meaning heroes, hopes to tackle issues that many young Kenyans feel unable to talk about

In a workshop among the shady trees of a Nairobi suburb the finishing touches are being put to Shujaaz, a cutting-edge comic strip that its creators hope will captivate the imaginations of Kenyan teenagers.

Hunched over drawing boards and computers, young men and women in their late teens and early twenties are creating their own world. In Africa’s patriarchal societies old men rule and young people keep quiet. They are ignored and told little about their rights or how to counter the stoking of ethnic divisions by venal politicians.

Shujaaz, meaning heroes, aims to break the old rules and address these contentious subjects head on. Among the topics highlighted are the problems of having enough to live on, what citizens can demand of government and how different people can live together.

The challenge was finding a way of giving teenagers important life messages without being patronising. The answer was Hunt Emerson, a British cartoonist, who, among other creations, redrew the old favourite Little Plum for the Beano.

In 2007 he published a graphic novel of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and has drawn comics illustrating the thoughts and work of the 19th-century English social thinker John Ruskin.

“If he can make The Ancient Mariner and Ruskin work as a comic he can make anything work,” said Rob Burnet, director of Well Told Story, the consultancy producing Shujaaz. He persuaded Mr Emerson to visit Nairobi this year to run a three-day workshop with a group of young, self-taught Kenyan cartoonists.

“Here was a group of artists and writers with a lot of ideas but they didn’t know how to turn it all into a comic,” Mr Emerson said.

“When you try to include a message you can get bogged down in words so I talked to them about dealing with big ideas through small stories.”

He was surprised by the natural talent of some of the young Kenyans, describing one as a “remarkable find”.

The comic that they have produced describes a world that is recognisably Kenyan populated by characters such as Boyie — roughly meaning geezer — a geeky-cool school-leaver with a shock of dreadlocks, glasses and a pirate radio station in a shed.

Then there is Maria Kim, the foxy teenager who plays mum to her little brother in a slum shack and has to avoid predatory men on her way to school, or Charlie Pele, the football- mad 14-year-old living with his father in a camp for people displaced by the violence that tore through Kenya after the 2007 elections.

The speech bubbles are in “sheng”, an idiomatic collision of English and Swahili slang that has become the language of Kenya’s youth — adults don’t get it, which is just the point. This month the first 24-page issue of Shujaaz will be distributed across Kenya inside the Daily Nation newspaper.

It will also be available from 1,800 clapboard booths used by agents of M-Pesa, the mobile- phone money transfer service that has revolutionised financial services for millions of ordinary Kenyans.

A website and a daily radio show simulating Boyie’s pirate station will launch at the same time. When Boyie asks his comic strip audience to text him the real audience will be able to join in, blurring the lines between fiction and reality as the comic book characters take on real lives.

The entire comic will also be available as an online animation and in a downloadable version for mobile phones.

The first print run of half a million has been paid for with a £50,000 grant from the British High Commission. Mr Burnet estimates that, as the comics are passed around groups of friends and school playgrounds, their message might reach as many as ten million Kenyan teenagers.