The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has disclosed that almost half of infants under 6 months are not being exclusively breastfed.
This is contained in a press release issued by GSS to mark this year’s World Breastfeeding Week.
World Breastfeeding Week is commemorated annually during the first week in August to highlight the importance of breastfeeding and to promote access to breastfeeding support and opportunities. The theme for 2024 is “Closing the Gap: Breastfeeding Support for All.”
In its press release, GSS provided data from the 2022 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) to provide insight into breastfeeding practices in the country.
The release said almost half (47.4%) of children aged 0 to 5 months in Ghana were not being exclusively breastfed according to the 2022 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS).
The percentage of children under 6 months not being exclusively breastfed has stagnated over the past two decades: increasing marginally by 0.8 percentage points between 2003 (46.6%) and 2022.
The 2022 GDHS indicates that breastfeeding in Ghana is near universal: 96.8 percent of children born in the two years preceding the survey had ever been breastfed.
However, the initiation and duration of exclusive breastfeeding fall short of the World Health Organisation recommendation for breastfeeding which states that “children should initiate breastfeeding within the first hour of birth and be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life.”
Two in every five (41.8%) children born in the two years preceding the 2022 GDHS did not start breastfeeding within the first hour of life. In three regions, more than half of the children did not start breastfeeding within the first hour of life: Greater Accra (56.2%), Ahafo (56.1%), and Eastern (51.7%). The region with the lowest percentage that did not initiate breastfeeding within the first hour was Bono East (29.4%) followed by Volta (31.6%). Nationally, the median duration for exclusive breastfeeding was 2.9 months.
The Western North Region had the shortest median duration for exclusive breastfeeding of one month followed by the Western (1.2 months) and the Greater Accra (1.4 months) regions. Half of the 16 regions had a median duration for exclusive breastfeeding of less than three months. The Savannah Region had the longest median duration for exclusive breastfeeding (4.7 months) followed by the Volta Region (4.4 months).
