In Kenya, 24 per cent of nurses are male. [Courtesy]
As the world marked Nurses Day this week, gender disparity in the profession came into sharp focus with only 13 per cent of the world s nurses being men.
In Kenya, 24 per cent of nurses are male. In other words, for every ten nurses, just about two are male.
However, according to Seth Panyako, the secretary-general of Kenya National Union of Nurses (KNUN), the world doesn t need more men in the nursing profession but more professional nurses - both male and female.
“There is no crisis to warrant that we encourage more men to become nurses,” Panyako says.
The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have been working with partners including farmers, funders Biovision Foundation Switzerland and the Agriculture for Nutrition and health CGIAR Research Program A4NH, as well as the Kenyan Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Cooperatives, to tackle this challenge.
African leafy vegetables like Amaranth, can contain 200 times more vitamin A and 10 times the iron of a similarly sized portion of cabbage, for example. In partnership with Vihiga County Department of Health, through trainings, demonstration plots, seed banks and use of community health volunteers to carry out door-to-door nutrition training, the project has reached more than 20,000 women between the age of 15 and 49 years, in ten sub-locations in the county over four years.