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Protect breastfeeding – A shared responsibility

05 August 2021 | Story Dr Chantell Witten | Photo Supplied

Opinion article by Dr Chantell Witten, Division of Health Professions Education, University of the Free State.

World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year from 1-7 August. In South Africa, it coincides with Women’s Month and gives us the opportunity to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go to achieve gender equity in different spheres of life. Even more reason for us in the academic sphere to stop and think about the areas of support that may still need attention and effort to correct.

In the context of protecting breastfeeding this would speak to the Code of Good Conduct in the Labour Act which affords pregnant and breastfeeding women protection and support. In extreme cases it means protection from exposure to hazardous substances, but in the general setting of the work environment this relates to workplace support for a private and safe place to express breastmilk. One institution made headlines when a staff member was secretly videoed while she was expressing breastmilk. What is also needed is to put in place a policy that guides on how university property such as a fridge may or may not be used to store expressed breastmilk, or how to deal with a manager who insists on holding meetings in a woman’s scheduled milk-expressing time slots. The law may indicate that you are entitled to two 30-minute time slots to express but it is quite another issue to get your colleagues to accommodate or respect your biological needs.

Protecting breastfeeding

Besides the protection of employees, the government in its commitment to improve child health and nutrition has committed to protect breastfeeding from the undue influence of the infant-formula industry by implementing the recommendations of the International Code for the Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. South Africa approved the Regulations Relating to Foodstuff for Infants and Young Children (R991) to control the marketing and promotion of infant formula by limiting how the product may be marketed and how the industry may engage with the public and child health and development professionals, in particular.

While many are aware of the prohibition to advertise or to promote and distribute free or incentivised sales of infant formula, many may not be aware of the limitations placed on academics and researchers. The academic and research fraternity has had a long and conflicted relationship and history with the infant-formula industry. Many departments and individual researchers have received funding, conference sponsorship and gifts from the infant-formula industry. In the early 2000s at the height of the HIV epidemic, the Department of Health recommended that women living with HIV should not breastfeed and instead provided six months of free formula milk, inadvertently implying that health professionals approved of infant formula. While the national Department of Health has since stopped the distribution of free infant formula through the programme for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) from 2011, many health professionals trained in the early years continue giving mixed messages to mothers and display limited skills to promote and support breastfeeding.

So how do we protect breastfeeding in the academic setting?

As more women enter academia, managers and the institutional leadership need to be cognisant and purposeful in developing a breastfeeding culture by granting women the protections afforded them by the Labour Law. Furthermore, in all spheres of academia and research, and as an institution, we need to guard against conflict of interest and conflicted relationships with the infant-formula industry. We need to do due diligence by raising the awareness of R991. All child health and development professionals should be acquainted with R991 through their curricula, and we should individually and collectively be accountable in our conduct to protect, promote and support breastfeeding as a human right, an investment in health and development, and for a sustainable future. There can be no greater dividend than to invest in optimal nutrition for infants and our children. They are the future.

News Archive

Leader of Bafokeng nation delivers a guest lecture at UFS

2011-05-05

Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi, leader of the Royal Bafokeng, Proff. Teuns Verschoor, Vice-Rector: Institutional Affairs, Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of our university, and Hendri Kroukamp, Dean of our Faculty Economic and Management Sciences (acting).
Photo: Stephen Collett

Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi, leader of the Royal Bafokeng nation, asked the pertinent questions: Who decides our fate as South Africans? Who owns our future? in the JN Boshoff Memorial Lecture at our university.

He said: “It’s striking that today, with all the additional freedoms and protections available to us, we have lost much of the pioneering spirit of our ancestors. In this era of democracy and capitalist growth (systems based on choice, accountability, and competition), we nevertheless invest government with extraordinary responsibility for our welfare, livelihoods, and even our happiness. We seem to feel that government should not only reconcile and regulate us, but also house us, school us, heal us, employ us, even feed us.

“And what government can’t do, the private sector will. Create more jobs, invest in social development and the environment, bring technical innovations to our society, make us part of the global village. But in forfeiting so much authority over our lives and our society to the public and private sectors, I believe we have given away something essential to our progress as people and a nation: the fundamental responsibility we bear for shaping our future according to aims, objectives, and standards determined by us.”

He shared the turnaround of the education system in the 45 schools in the 23 communities of the Bafokeng nation and the effect of greater community, NGOs, the church and other concerned parties’ engagement in the curricula and activities with the audience. School attendance improved from 80% to 90% in two years and the top learners in the matric maths in Northwest were from the Bafokeng nation.

Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi stressed the need for people to help to make South Africa a better place: “As a country, we speak often of the need for leadership, the loss of principles, a decline in values. But too few of us are willing to accept the risk, the expense, the liability, and sometimes even the blame, that accompanies attempting to make things better. We are trying to address pressing issues we face as a community, in partnership with government, and with the tools and resources available to us as a traditionally governed community. It goes without saying that we can and should play a role in deciding our fate as members of this great country, and in the Royal Bafokeng Nation, as small as it is, we are determined to own our own future.”

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