KUCHING, March 5 — A statement about 84 per cent of Sarawakian children being undernourished highlighted in a bank’s social funding campaign comes as a shock to a state minister.

A view over the Alliance Bank’s website shows the campaign titled ‘Feed a Child Today. Your Donation Fights Hunger, Nourishes Dreams’, which also cites the Household Income Survey Report 2022 (Department of Statistics Malaysia) in saying that more than 97,000 hardcore poor families live in the rural areas of Sarawak.

In a statement issued yesterday, Minister for Women, Childhood and Community Wellbeing Development Datuk Seri Fatimah Abdullah described the campaign’s headline as ‘shocking’.

"To say that 84 per cent of Sarawakian children are undernourished, this shocks me, especially when the statistics from National Institutes of Health showed that in 2016, 19.4 per cent of children below the age of five were underweight; in 2023, the figure was 15.6 per cent,” she said.

In Sarawak, according to Fatimah, the state government has been providing the Special Annual Grant (GTK) for registered early childhood learning institutions since 2019.

"The GTK can be used to provide balanced and healthy meals to the children, as well as to facilitate the running of fun learning, experiential learning and digitalisation of early childhood care and education.

"It also includes the parents’ involvement programmes, and continuous professional development for educators and caregivers.

"Since 2019, this grant has helped 13,716 early childhood learning institutions through total allocation of RM68.84 million.

"Moreover, the Ministry of Education (MoE) also implements the ‘Supplementary Food Programme’ (RMT) for school-children.

"If we could be furnished with the names of schools (in Sarawak) meant to be provided with meals, the state Ministry of Education, Innovation and Talent Development and the state Education Department could verify the situation on the ground, whether or not the primary schoolchildren did receive the RMT, which is a federal-funded programme,” said Fatimah in the statement. — The Borneo Post