An interview with Vivien Naoyal

What is your role within ACF and what does it involve?

As the assistant manager of the programme, my primary role is to oversee all of the activities of the programme. This includes the preparation of activity reports (statistics and narrative) for partners, assisting with a variety of meetings with partners, doing qualitative and quantitative analyses of the programme activities, placing orders internally according to the needs of the team and training staff members on certain topics.

My team consists of 12 mobile health workers who work in 6 health centres around the town. I support the logisitics of their work and make regular visits to the health centres to monitor their progress.

Could you describe the nutritional context of the community where you work?

The nutritional context of the community is rarely secure. This is especially the case for the children of the town who are our priority. The number of admissions is also on the rise. The situation varies from year to year. The data from the latest nutritional survey shows that the nutritional situation is precarious.

What challenges do you face in the work that you do? How do you overcome them?

The main challenge for me lies with the treatment itself. The programme is recording high rates of drop-outs (children who do not completely finish their treatment and abandon the programme before the three months of treatment has elapsed) and this reduces the performance of the programme. Much analysis has been done and continues to take place to identify the causes of this problem and to find a lasting solution.
Another challenge which we face is being able to treat all of the children in the locality who are suffering from acute malnutrition. Many children die due to the insufficient coverage of the treatment of acute malnutrition. This can be solved by raising awareness of the problem, not just with the general population, but also with political, religious and traditional authorities. The only way in which we can tackle this problem would be to lobby these authorities to take more action to address the problems linked to malnutrition and to organise sensitisations on a massive scale with the population.