South Africa is going strong on breastfeeding

The breastfeeding environment in South Africa is about to become stronger, thanks to Nourished Truth.

Nourished Truth is a strategic advocacy and engagement campaign aimed at protecting women’s breastfeeding choices from the influence of formula marketing. It is a joint creation by the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the Healthy Living Alliance (HEALA), supported by the Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation (FLRF).

Now complete, Nourished Truth is ready to be implemented.

“We’re excited to get the Nourished Truth messages out to health workers and educators in South Africa because they speak to real needs, using strategies built on hard data,” says HEALA CEO Nzama Mbalati.

For example, Nourished Truth alerts nursing students to look behind formula marketing to recognize sales agendas. In another example, the campaign wrote a layperson, or ‘plain language’ summary of the South African Regulations Relating to Foodstuffs for Infants and Young Children (R991), with the aim to raise awareness by making the regulations easier to digest and give health workers a chance to act accordingly.

Nourished Truth launched in 2022. It began with a deep dive for data on the national breastfeeding environment led by Dr. Chantell Witten and Professor Julian May – our thanks and appreciation to them, the UWC, and the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security.

“Our goal was to maximize the likelihood for impact by using evidence from a thoughtfully planned research study to build the advocacy and engagement campaign,” says UWC Professor and Director of the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security, Professor Julian May.

Their findings fed the advocacy and engagement strategy. HEALA built out targeted messages, tested these messages with the target audiences, developed dissemination plans, and is currently fundraising so that they can implement the Nourished Truth campaign over the next two years.

The partners have also published their work in a free operational playbook that will be available on LactaHub.org. The playbook lays out the procedural steps – including detailed templates – that other countries can use to build and implement their own advocacy and engagement campaigns.

“We are grateful to everyone for coming together to bring Nourished Truth to life in South Africa. Now with the playbook, their efforts can kick-start similar efforts in new places as well using a proven process that reliably produces a country-specific and scalable advocacy and engagement solution,” says FLRF Managing Director Dr. Katharina Lichtner.

FLRF funded the campaign’s initial rollout. If you are interested in helping HEALA raise funds for multi-year campaign impact, please contact them at info@heala.org.

If you are interested in implementing Nourished Truth in your community, we are happy to share our learnings. Please contact us at kathrin.litwan@larsson-rosenquist.org.

Heartfelt thanks and congratulations to our partners for a job well done!

Nourished Truth aligns with the World Health Organization strategic initiative to help countries strengthen legislation that counters aggressive formula milk marketing outlined in the 2022 WHO and UNICEF report: How the marketing of formula milk influences our decisions on infant feeding.