At least 79.4 percent of Rwandan infants aged between six months and 2 years old do not meet the standard requirements on Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) with regards to meal frequency and meal diversity, a new official report released Wednesday in Kigali said.
The leading sources of infant feeding information were family members, neighbours, friends, according to the Multidimensional Child Poverty in Rwanda reports released by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR).
According to the new findings, the majority of children in Rwanda (94.9 per cent) are deprived in at least one dimension of their well-being while nearly two out of three children under five (65.8 per cent) face multidimensionally poverty.
Children living in rural areas show higher deprivation levels than children living in urban areas for all dimensions analysed. The data show that 77.0 per cent of children aged 0-23 months living in rural areas experience deprivation in the Housing dimension compared
to 45.9 percent of children living in urban areas.
The education level of the household head and/or the mother has an important influence on the deprivation levels of children. The higher the education level, the lower the multidimensional deprivation levels experienced, the report said.
The new findings show that between 2015 and 2020, the number of children (0-4 years) suffering from deprivations simultaneously declined from 28.1 per cent to 23.5 per cent in Rwanda.
CU/abj/APA