According to a statement, she was briefed about the progress of the nutrition, vaccination and stunting programme by WFP Programme Officer Dr. Aftab and Provisional Officer incharge of Sindh Ms. Aleen. The BISP Chairperson praised the efforts of the WFP for nutrition and food security of children and women in different areas of the country.
WFP is covering 700,000 persons for provision of proper nutrition either through food or through cash in 26 districts. WFP uses MUAC and BMI techniques for gauging the child and mother growth respectively.
The State Minister's visit to the WFP office in Jhimpir comes a couple of days after she held a meeting with Ms. Lola Castro, Country Director WFP, who called on her at BISP Secretariat, Islamabad and discussed matters of mutual cooperation.
Marvi Memon said there is an established link between cash transfer and food security and better nutrition levels and BISP has a significant food security impact.
The BISP Chairperson said that BISP beneficiaries were the most prone to stunting, malnutrition, lack of nutrition awareness due to their poverty levels. As such she considered it BISP's duty to ensure that this segment of the population is given best possible nutrition awareness, vaccination, nutrients to ensure that they develop to becoming productive members of workforce.
She said that BISP's future interventions in fixing stunting through potential creation of conditional cash transfer programs would go a long way in producing Pakistanis who could race Pakistan out of a developing into being developed country.
The WFP representative proposed to work with the BISP by sharing and getting advantage of each others' data. Marvi Memon directed her team to coordinate with the WFP team to scrutinize the data in order to check those BISP beneficiaries who are also included in the WFP data so that the duplication of the efforts could be avoided.