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Centre for Communication and Glocal Change

C4D in Celebration of the World Breastfeeding Week

by Yuliya on 2015 August 6 12:00

For the last 25 years The World Breastfeeding Week has been celebrated during the first week of August to raise awareness about benefits of breastfeeding. A global target set by the World Health Assembly is to increase exclusive breastfeeding rates for newborns to at least 50% by 2025. How can C4D contribute to the target?

 

This year’s theme for the World Breastfeeding Week is Breastfeeding and Work: Let’s Make it Work. Many female workers stop breastfeeding when returning back to their workplace after delivering babies. A major problem is social stigma and lack of supportive national policies. Moreover, there is commercial pressure from formula producers to discontinue breastfeeding.

Here is how UNICEF in China promotes breastfeeding in a workplace.

In 2014 top breastfeeding countries were:

  • Rwanda: 90%

  • Sri Lanka: 76%

  • Cambodia, Solomon Islands, Nepal :74%

 At the global level rates of breastfeeding are not declining yet overall less than 40% of infants are exclusively breastfed. C4D in this case can play an immense role: increase awareness about benefits of breastfeeding, diminish public disapproval and save millions of newborn lives that die each year from preventable causes.

 An outstanding example of raising awareness is the global synchronized  celebration of breastfeeding where women  come at registered locations and breastfeed  in public at the set time for one minute. This year the Big Latch On took place across 28 countries with attendance of over 15.000 women. In addition, there was a  one day social media campaign, Sunday Selfies, which resulted in over 300 breastfeeding selfies posted with a #mybiglatchon.

 

infographic_breastfeeding-page-001
Source: WHO

 

 World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) outlined five goals of the World Breastfeeding Week 2015: to galvanize support, to promote actions by employers, to inform public,  to strengthen supportive practices and to engage with target groups. All of these are directly linked to communication practices.  Besides attending and supporting projects, activists are encouraged to create their own events. WABA also offers a  social media toolkit to help activists launch their initiatives and raise awareness about breastfeeding via social media.
Screen Shot 2015-08-06 at 11.05.50
Source: WABA

Image via UNICEF

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