Nutrition Education and Policy:
A Partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and Makerere University, Uganda

Makerere University/UW-Madison

A Partnership in Nutrition Project

One of every seven Ugandan children dies before their fifth birthday, and malnutrition is estimated to cause almost half of these deaths. About 40% of children under five in Uganda are stunted, a failure to grow reflecting malnutrition over a long period of time. Malnutrition in childhood is associated with a lifetime of limited cognitive and physical capacity – for those who survive. This terrible human tragedy and staggering loss of societal potential are typical of much of Africa and are central to understanding the continent and its future.

The proposed partnership program would focus on education reform and health policy to strengthen the capacity of Makerere University to contribute to alleviating malnutrition; and it would improve the ability of Wisconsin faculty to teach, do research, and conduct outreach to enhance understanding in the U.S. of the many dimensions of malnutrition in Uganda and other developing countries.

Understanding and fighting malnutrition requires the engagement of a wide range of disciplines. At Makerere University, the requisite expertise is distributed among faculty members in the Department of Food Science and Technology, the Center for Continuing Education, the Institute of Public Health (IPH), Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), the Faculties of Social Sciences and Agriculture, and other units. At Wisconsin, there is a similar dispersion of expertise relevant to nutrition, but with the important difference that Wisconsin also has a Department of Nutritional Sciences. Makerere sees the proposed support of nutritional sciences as critical to making more effective use of existing expertise for teaching and research, as well as enhancing cooperation with local and international agencies and NGOs.

As Uganda’s dominant institution of higher education, Makerere educates leaders from all disciplines who will play important roles in the country’s development. Makerere needs to insure that future leaders from diverse disciplines understand the challenges of dealing with malnutrition. The proposed exchange will enhance the ability of the Makerere faculty to teach about nutrition in its broad social, political, economic, and policy contexts.

Makerere also needs to expand and sharpen its focus on nutrition per se. In a recent nutrition assessment by the Institute of Public Health, Uganda’s central and local authorities expressed an urgent need to have people trained and working on nutrition in the districts while enough nutrition experts are trained to take over leadership and supervisory roles. The exchange will help Makerere develop its educational programs to meet such needs.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has an obligation to educate students and citizens about the living conditions facing much of the world’s populations. Malnutrition is a central fact of life for over 800 million people worldwide, and for over one third of Africans. Wisconsin will endeavor to advance understanding of this reality by bringing to bear the strengths of its highly ranked programs in African Studies, economic development, and nutrition.

One indication of Wisconsin’s commitment to furthering understanding of malnutrition is the Uganda undergraduate study abroad program, now in its second year. Under this program, students spend fall semester at Wisconsin studying Uganda’s malnutrition situation and then spend three weeks in Uganda visiting villages and clinics under the mentorship of Makerere and UW professors. A similar program for graduate students and health professional students is starting this year.

Uganda is a leader among developing countries in effective public health policies. Best known are its aggressive policies to fight HIV/AIDS. But the Government of Uganda (GOU) has also moved strongly on a broad front to decrease mortality and malnutrition among children under five. The USAID-GOU partnership has the stated objective of reducing the mortality of children from malnutrition, malaria, HIV/AIDS and vaccine preventable diseases.

The GOU Nutrition and Early Childhood Development Project (and related Community and Home Initiatives for Long-Term Development –CHILD- project) in partnership with the World Bank includes the following objectives: to reduce moderate and severe malnutrition among children younger than 6 years of age; to raise the awareness of families and communities for children’s health, nutrition, and psychosocial development; and to increase capacity of women and communities to mobilize savings and resources for better care of children.

Evaluation of the GOU Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) project found that women’s education was a key determinant of childhood mortality. This is consistent with the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2000 cross-national study of child malnutrition by Lisa Smith and Lawrence Haddad. (Smith received her PhD from UW-Madison.) This study found that improving the care-taking abilities of women through education was the most effective step that could be taken to lower childhood malnutrition in developing countries. Makerere’s community nutrition education programming can play a vital role here.

The proposed program builds on the 1997-2000 Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs grant under the aegis of the UW African Studies Program and the Makerere Institute of Social Research. This grant, under the title, “Strengthening Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in a Changing World,” covered a wide range of topics and revitalized the UW-Makerere relationship following the Amin era. As a result, there is now a steady exchange of faculty and students, an undergraduate exchange is now in its second year and a graduate exchange is about to begin, and the two universities are quite familiar with each other. The proposed exchange would use this broad, solid base as a foundation on which to build an intensive, highly focused program dealing with education and health policy to alleviate malnutrition.