PMD Requires Villages In South Sumatra's OKU To Allocate Budget For Handling Stunting

Illustration of a child experiencing stunting or malnutrition. (ANTARA/HO)

SUMSEL - The Village Community Empowerment Service (PMD) of Ogan Komering Ulu Regency (OKU) requires all village governments in the area to budget for stunting. The budget for its activities is absorbed from the respective village fund allocations (ADD).

Head of the OKU PMD Service, Ahmad Firdaus, said stunting prevention in the village was one of the priority programs to reduce the number of malnutrition in children in the local area.

Handling stunting in villages is included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the direction of village development policies.

"For the handling of stunting, every village in OKU Regency has started to budget for it since 2019 through ADD," he said in Baturaja, OKU, South Sumatra (Sumsel), quoted from Antara, Wednesday, May 18.

In addition, the village head is also required to budget for salary honorariums for village human development cadres (KPM) and healthy village house operations from each village which are adjusted to village finances.

"Alhamdulillah, until now, of the 145 villages in OKU, all of them have carried out the instructions of the Minister of Village Regulation Number 7 of 2021 concerning the Implementation of the Village Fund," he said.

For the handling of stunting, he said, every village was asked to collect data on children under the age of 5 years and pregnant women.

Through this data collection, his party can report to the Puskesmas or the OKU District Health Office so that snacks can be carried out for malnourished children and pregnant women.

"Through these efforts, it is hoped that OKU Regency will be free from stunting," he hoped.

Meanwhile, based on data from the OKU District Health Office throughout 2021, there were 882 stunting cases experienced by children in the region.

Head of the Public Health Division of the OKU Health Service, Dedi Wijaya, said that until October 2021 there were 882 cases of stunting in his area.

This number is down when compared to 2020 which reached 921 cases of children experiencing failure to thrive.

This decrease in cases was due to assistance from a number of village officials who budgeted funds to reduce the number of stunting cases in OKU Regency.

In addition to budgeting funds, continued Dedi, village officials at OKU are also proactive in providing socialization to their residents on how to provide nutritious food for toddlers by utilizing local natural resources.

"They are also active in helping local governments to revive posyandu in their respective areas so that residents who used to be lazy to come to posyandu, are now gradually willing to come again," he said.