Giving Compass' Take:

• Maaike Arts describes the findings of UNICEF's report: Breastfeeding: A Mother’s Gift for Every Child. The report emphasizes the importance of breastfeeding for both the baby and the mother and highlights the disparities in breastfeeding rates between countries.

• How can philanthropy help to overcome barriers to breastfeeding? What are the different needs of high and low-income countries? 

• Read about the UN's guidance aimed to boost exclusive breastfeeding.

Maaike Arts, a nutrition specialist with UNICEF, said the nutritional importance of exclusive breastfeeding has long been understood, but new evidence continues to emerge of the long-term health benefits it confers, including a reduced risk of maternal cancers. As the weight of evidence continues to grow, she said, it increases the pressure to better understand what is preventing women breastfeeding.

What motivated you to produce this report?

We know breastfeeding is important for children’s health [and] for mothers’ health all over the world and we wanted to see what the situation actually is if you look at different countries – both high-income and low-income countries. We sort of knew that breastfeeding is practiced more in lower- and middle-income countries and less in high-income countries, but we didn’t know the magnitude of that.

We found that 7.6million – that is, 5 percent of – children [around] the world are never breastfed. That was quite a striking finding.

In lower- and middle-income countries, it is the less wealthy families that are more likely to breastfeed and in high-income countries, it’s the opposite.

Why is that?

The reasons for that are all different, but it comes down to support for women.

I think in high-income countries and among wealthier families in low-income countries there is a perception that breastfeeding is for the poor. That is misinformation, in a way, because part of that misinformation also comes from the fact that there is still a lot of marketing of breastmilk substitutes.

And then, of course, policies like maternity leave or maternity protection in the broader sense of the word. If women don’t have maternity leave or very short leave and no time or space to breastfeed at work, that’s another reason why [they don’t].

Read the full interview with Maaike Arts about breastfeeding rate disparities by Amruta Byatnal at News Deeply.