Felicity Savage King
Colloquium's coordinator

n Central Europe," said Dr. Katalin Sarlai, a paediatrician and neonatologist from Budapest, "before the revolution in 1989, we didn't hear about breastfeeding programmes. Now thanks to efforts like WABA, the movement for promoting breastfeeding has spread to at least all the urban centres in Hungary."

Her words must have been music for those gathered at the colloquium in STOU last week ahead of the WABA Global Forum. For five and a half days, from Nov 25 to 30, trainers from some 35 countries swapped experiences, learned from each other's experiences and crafted a vision of training for the future, which will be presented to the Forum on Wednesday.

One of the major concerns to emerge from their discussion was the need to take breastfeeding promotion beyond mothers, to persons outside like policy-makers, governments, health professionals not directly involved with mother and child care. Getting governments to implement the Code will be a major task.

The colloquium agreed that the campaign has made significant progress in parts of South America, in Nigeria in Africa and Egypt in recent years. But a lot still needs to be done.

According to Dr Rolando Figueroa, an obstetrician from Guatemala, the efforts of trainers and those trained must be recognised.