Community education helps children eat well in Zambia

16th October is World Food Day, a UN initiative promoting a good standard of nutrition and ending hunger worldwide. In Zambia, Plan is working with rural communities to improve the nutrition of local children by educating their parents and building a community hub.

Josephine is a mother of three young children. She makes a living from subsistence farming. For years her family’s diet consisted of only nshima (a thick local porridge made from cassava or maize flour), cassava leaves and occasionally fish.

At the beginning of every rainy season, like many families in her village, she has to spend a lot of time tilling the land and planting the year’s crops. This makes it difficult to properly care for the children and ensure they are well fed. Generally especially at this time of year children have only one meal a day, every day, of the same type of food.

Josephine’s children were all suffering as a result, but her three years old son was worst off. He was underweight and had chronic diarrhoea and was often ill. In fact 50% of the children aged 6 to 36 months whose parents took part in a nutritional survey carried out by Plan and other partners in the Mansa area were underweight.

In response to the survey, the partnership decided to pilot a project to fight malnutrition in Josephine’s village. The project is a home-based nutrition programme for children who are at risk of protein-energy malnutrition. Community members volunteered for the initial training, with the hope that they would then be able to pass their knowledge around the rest of the community.

The early sessions were held at the homes of those taking part. Volunteers were taught about food types, the value of a balanced diet, prevention of malnutrition and childhood diseases, and growth monitoring. They were also taught how to actively involve other mothers and their children and pass their knowledge on.

Building community

Members of the community contributed to the project by constructing a communal cooking space/hearth shelter, a toilet, a rack for drying dishes, dug a rubbish pit and donated cooking utensils. This space was to become the centre of the project as it expanded.

The first sessions in the new space took place in January 2009. Rehabilitating each child takes 12 days.  At the same time talks on health and nutrition are given by one of the volunteers. The parents and volunteers prepare locally available foods like cassava meal porridge with groundnuts, beans, soya beans, nshima (maize porridge), roasted cassava, pumpkins, fish, bananas, pineapples and mangoes. Meals cooked are balanced, so that the parents learn to feed their children using the three main food groups.

Before taking part in the project, most of the women of Nsama village used to feed their children plain porridge, without adding anything of nutritional value. Now they understand the importance of adding ground mushrooms, fish or caterpillars, groundnuts, beans and fruit to the porridge.

Improvement

Within seven months of the start of the project, the children’s health started to improve. “A few months following my child’s enrolment in this programme, his weight improved to 15kg,” said Josephine.

Women who have participated in the project have noticed the reduction in diseases such as diarrhoea and Kwashiorkor (a form of malnutrition) among children. The project has been successful enough that will be scaled up and taken to other local villages.

“We invite graduating mothers to come back to do selected talks to new entrants in the programme. The graduating mothers are also followed up closely for two months to see how they are coping in their care for children,” reported a trained volunteer.

Plan with its partners, including members of the community, have also seen possibilities in using this type of community training in other health related projects. This could include safe motherhood projects for pregnant mothers.

The hearth/shelter itself can also serve as a central place for conducting child immunisation, growth monitoring and various other community development initiatives such as income generation projects.