BARMM's multi-sector anti-child malnutrition campaign intensified

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July 28, 2026 | 5:58pm

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — The Bangsamoro region has the highest child malnutrition statistics compared to all regions in the country, something that different government agencies and foreign humanitarian outfits are now trying to address head-on.

Bangsamoro regional officials, among them Health Minister Kadil Sinolinding, Jr., Austere Panadero, who is president of the Zuellig Family Foundation, and experts from the central office of the Department of Science and Technology and the United Nations Children’s Fund tackled the issue during the July 27 to 28 nutrition summit in a function facility in Cotabato City.

Provincial officials of the Ministry of Health-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, representatives of local government units in BARMM’s five provinces, Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Tawi-Tawi, and three cities, Lamitan, Marawi and Cotabato, the region’s capital, participated in the two-day event, held at the Al-Nor Complex in uptown Cotabato City.

The two-day summit, themed “Strengthening Partnership and Accelerating Action Towards a Well-Nourished Bangsamoro,” was a consensus-building activity meant to solidify and boost the anti-child malnutrition campaign of regional and national agencies, LGUs and foreign entities that have anti-malnutrition and child care programs in BARMM.

Two representatives from DOST’s central office, the supervising science research specialists Ma. Lilibeth Dasco and Eva Goyena, Jennifer Nandu, who is also from Zuellig Family Foundation, and the chief of MoH-BARMM's nutrition division, Celia Sagaral, and the chief of the Maguindanao Integrated Provincial Health Office, the physician Ariff Baguindali, also shared insights then on how to best eradicate child malnutrition in the autonomous region.

Some of the summit participants had asserted, one after another, that peace and security issues in far-flung areas and fallacies, or superstitions about bad effects of certain farm products to human health, are among the many issues that contribute to child malnutrition in far-flung areas in BARMM.

Local executives had separately told reporters that the conflicts instigated by the now both defunct Dawlah Islamiya and Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters in Maguindanao del Sur and Maguindanao del Norte, which triggered the recurring displacement of marginalized Moro families from 2015 to 2023, had caused malnutrition of children in areas where the two groups once operated with impunity.

Sinolinding and his subordinate officials in the MoH-BARMM had pointed out during the summit that in 2015, agencies of the then Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which was replaced with a more empowered BARMM in 2019, recorded 42.5% of children’s stunting growth rate in the local communities due to malnutrition.

He said the figures lowered to 33.6% in 2019, for them a considerable improvement, but still have to be addressed for being so high if compared to the malnutrition and children’s growth stunting statistics in all regions in the country.

“Our efforts to address, rip that problem from its bud, still need more technical and manpower and financial investments,” the physician-ophthalmologist Sinolinding, also a member of BARMM’s 80-seat parliament, said.

A Yakan physician, Nur Khan Istarul, who is a member of the Basilan Sangguniang Panlalawigan, said that only by a sustained, continuing inter-agency and multi-sector cooperation in addressing child malnutrition issues plaguing the region can the BARMM government and the LGUs under its jurisdiction totally address the problem.

Istarul, touted as a "doctor to the barrio," and his immediate superior in the Basilan provincial board, Vice Gov. Hadjiman Salliman, had separately assured to support the BARMM government’s anti-child malnutrition thrusts.

Participants in the two-day nutrition summit also committed to help push forward the programs of the virtual infant Bangsamoro Nutrition Commission, created only last July 9 via an enabling measure by the 80-member BARMM parliament, together authored last year by Sinolinding and a fellow regional lawmaker, Amilbahar Mawallil.

The newly-created Bangsamoro Nutrition Commission shall start functioning, using operational funds from BARMM’s coffer, after its personnel set-up has been fully established.