LINDIWE Sayi, 32, has weaned her baby when she was just three months old as the mother has to focus on her work as a vendor to earn a livelihood in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.
Her husband, 37-year-old Langton Muyeni, left the country last December, heading to neighbouring South Africa in search of greener pastures and has never been in touch with his wife since then. Seized with the role of having to fend for her three children, including the infant, the single mom now has to work even harder.
In Zimbabwe, Sayi is just one of many women, who, hard-pressed to the core by the country’s economic hardships, are forgoing exclusive breastfeeding. The globe has been marking the World Breastfeeding Week, a global campaign to raise awareness and galvanize action on breastfeeding, since 1992 annually between Aug. 1-7, with themes of healthcare systems, women and work.
Twenty-six years after it was marked first, a World Health Assembly resolution endorsed the World Breastfeeding Week as an important breastfeeding promotion strategy. Unfortunately, it has not received any recognition by Zimbabwean mothers who have prematurely weaned their babies off breast milk to attend to their families’ bread and butter issues.
“I have to live. My children need school fees and food, and if I had allowed myself to stay and focus on breastfeeding my last-born child, life would have been worse for us as a family today,” Sayi said. Breastfeeding is a thing of the past for many women in Zimbabwe, including Tracy Maunganidze, a mother of a four-month-old baby, who is working as a till operator in a grocery store in Harare.
Maunganidze said she has found it difficult to stick to the six months of exclusive breastfeeding, as she rather has to work to support her dependents, including her infant baby. “If single mothers like myself spent time breastfeeding, poverty would harm us more and we might starve as well together with our children, meaning nobody would be out there looking for food for us,” she said.
For Maunganidze, staying at home to focus on breastfeeding her baby, with nobody fending for the family, would mean malnutrition would pound all of them. Many other Zimbabwean women with infants have had to wean their babies early and start feeding them with solid foods instead. “Babies weaned before they could be breastfed exclusively for six months have very weak immune systems,” Arnold Rukoko, a pediatrician in Harare, said.
Marylin Chiza, a 31-year-old mother, retired from breastfeeding her now five-month-old baby boy two months ago. She, together with her husband, Nevson Chiza, 35, is employed at a local hotel in Harare. The mother, however, said they still cannot afford formula, the processed baby milk which costs US$7 per 400 grammes.
Marylin Chiza and her husband earn 25 000 Zimbabwean dollars (US$31) each per month. From the combined wage of US$62.50, they have to deduct their rentals for the two rooms they live in before they even start talking about monthly groceries. Faced with these challenges, many Zimbabwean mothers have had to opt out of breastfeeding and concentrate on working to help their husbands to eke out a living, meaning the weaned babies have to depend on solid foods much earlier. — Anadou
