Malnutrition in the Ashanti region
In Ghana, malnutrition is a big problem, especially among young children and women. Malnutrition in this report is defined as the condition of “undernutrition”, which doesn’t only indicate the cases where people don’t have enough food, but also covers the cases where people do have enough food, but where the food isn’t high in nutritional values which causes that these people lack of some important nutrients. Research has shown that malnutrition is the cause of 40% of all deaths among children (Unicef, 2008). There has been estimated that 42% of all Ghanaian children under the age of five, suffers from vitamin A-deficiency (Larty, 2009).Vitamin A is an important nutrient for the immune function, eye health, vision and growth (Rice, Keith, West & Black, 2004). There have been many initiatives that attempted to reduce the malnutrition rates, such als school lunch programs, nutrition education, introducing exotic vegetables and campaigns where children were given the necessary dose of vitamin A in supplements (Fuglie, 2001). None of these initiatives have shown a significant improvement so far. One of the reasons these methods aren’t functioning optimal, is because of the fact the solutions are from outside, sometimes even from abroad and there often has to be personnel in order to lead the approaches in the right direction.
Poverty in the Ashanti region
The percentage of the rural population below the poverty line in Ghana describes 31,4% (Buor, 2004). For this group of people, things like healthcare utilization are very difficult. In the Ashanti region, there is less poverty than in Northern Ghana, but the incidence of poverty within te district varies a lot.
(StatsGhana, 2015)
The figure shows that the number of poor people in the Ejisu Juaben district is 20000 to 29999. For Ghanaian perspectives this is an average number, but still it demonstrates there is a lot of poverty in this area.