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Global action needed to support women to combine breastfeeding and work – WABA

Jul 29, 2015 News

The World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) is calling for intensive global action to support women to combine breastfeeding and work this “World Breastfeeding Week”.
Catering for all, whether the woman is working in the formal, non-formal or home setting, it is essential that she is empowered in claiming her and her baby’s right to breastfeed.
World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year in more than 170 countries from the 1-7 August.
Over the years, the aims entailed the encouragement of breastfeeding and improvement in the health of babies all around the world. It honours the Innocenti Declaration made by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Rights and Emergency Relief Organisation (UNICEF) policy-makers in August 1990, to protect promote and support breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding is said to be the best way to provide newborns with the nutrients they need. WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for newborns up to 6 months of age; this is continued with breastfeeding alongside the appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age and beyond.
This year’s theme “Breastfeeding and work: Let’s make it work”, is aimed at galvanizing, promoting, strengthening, informing and engaging, an approach that tackles the sharp decline in breastfeeding rates and practices in the weeks or months after delivery, particularly exclusive breastfeeding.
The Mother-Friendly Workplace Initiative is an ongoing campaign promoting working women and breastfeeding, in which the 2015 theme has a direct correlation to the 1993 campaign.
According to WABA, much has been achieved in 22 years of global action supporting women in combining breastfeeding and work, particularly the adoption of the revised International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 183 on Maternity Protection with much stronger maternity entitlements, and more country actions on improving national laws and practices.
At the workplace level, WABA has also seen more action taken to set up breastfeeding or mother-friendly workplaces, including awards for breastfeeding-friendly employers, as well as greater mass awareness on working women’s rights to breastfeed.
The World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action also noted that, “There is much that remains to be done despite 25 years of hard work, particularly on the fourth Innocenti target that calls on governments to enact imaginative legislation protecting the breastfeeding rights of working women and establish means for its enforcement”.
With the World Breastfeeding Week 2015 campaign, WABA and its partners at global, regional and national levels aim to empower and support all women, working in both the formal and informal sectors, to adequately combine work with child-rearing, particularly breastfeeding.
The WABA-Coordinated World Breastfeeding Week is part of the Global Breastfeeding Initiative for Child Survival Programme (GBICS) entitled: “Enhancing Breastfeeding Rates Contributes to Women’s Rights, Health, and a Sustainable Environment”.
The GBICS Programme aims to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development – beyond the Millennium Development Goals – by scaling up breastfeeding, and infant and young child interventions and transforming Policies into Practice, which contributes to efforts aimed at addressing climate change and gender inequality in the framework of human rights.
WABA expressed gratitude to the NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) for its support of the GBICS.

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