Linking Agriculture with Early Childhood Development:The case of Gandini Community

Photo: Development Horizons

Child malnutrition remains a big problem for children in Kwale County and despite the statistics on the same lacking, areas like Kinango, Samburu and Gandini seems worst hit. Poor nutrition affects both the physical and  intellectual development of the child concerned. By malnutrition in this case, i look at the lack of vital vitamin and mineral nutrients in a diet as opposed to the Protein-energy malnutrition. Read more on the difference here 

Having worked in the area for quite some time, i noted that consumption of greeny vegetables was not considered of paramount importance in the county. The most valued food stuff was maize. With a harvest of maize crop everyone is considered full and satisfied and its no shock to realize that the stew that goes with it is a mixture of table salt and water. Well in terms of quantity, these ECD going children are getting filled but quality wise, their bodies are just being fed regularly with only carbohydrates.

Its because of these reasons that i thought of introducing the aspect of sack gardening to the Gandini community. It happens to be one of the worst poverty hit areas. Notwithstanding is the fact that the area is adjacent to Moi International Airport. While taking off from the airport,its the area you mostly see with mud-walled makuti houses. I chose sack-gardening bearing in mind that the area gets quite dry and water scarcity isn't a once in a lifetime issue. And sack/container gardens happen to be the least consumers of water.With the help of Plan Kwale education program, i set out to train them on how to go about preparing the sacks and the containers to make them suitable for planting vegetables. The first crop selection was kales, Amaranthus and spinachs. To inculcate the gardening culture, we preferred to have the sacks placed near the nursery school.

The initial demonstration plot.
This we chose to be in the homestead of the chairperson of the Gandini village elders. A sample of kales and spinaches were prepared in the nursery bed and later transplanted  to help convert the theory into practice.

The preparations stage

My colleagues, the chairman  and i (Photographer) inspecting the sacks.

The sample demo plots
Notice the yellowed leaves where there was over-watering in this case.

The results
I left the organization i was working with then and i happen to be getting the progress of the project via twitter and phone calls.To my knowledge as of now, the project has spread to neighboring school and hopefully by mid next year, we will have substantive data to give a success story of how agriculture can be interlinked with Nutrition.

cc @emmiewakio your project is doing really well...wish you were still around pic.twitter.com/1ubKHw8Ygf
— Joy Nafungo (@maben12) August 22, 2013

The buck doesn't stop there. The aspect of consuming vegetables for their nutrient value is still minimal in the area. Hence the vegetables farming and consumption gospel has to be preached continuously as  having the vegetables and not consuming brings no difference in the lives the ECD children and their families.

PS:
Have a look at the average nutrient contents in various indigenous vegetables......

Paying it Forward: Social media Training for Kwale Arts Troupe

A Section of some of the participants

Kwale Arts Troupe is a very active youth group that uses arts/acting to pass various messages to the community. They have been in active collaboration with Plan International Kwale WASH program and the Ministry of Health especially on issues of reproductive health.

Just recently they produced a movie called KIZA and even performed a poem during this year's Madaraka Day. Looking at the potential they have and the data I got from them during the APPR process, I sought to help profile their presence online.

For two days, (27th and 28th June, 2013) I led them through the social media training whose objectives were:

• To expose the trainees on various social media tools at their disposal.
• Learn how to open and operate a various social media channels (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook page and YouTube)
• To come up with a social media strategy to aid their activities online.

The first day was mainly introducing them to social media. We delved in to the objectives of the training, their expectations from the training and what social media is general is. The group expected to gain insights as to the use of various social media tools.

One of the powerpoint slides

Later on, we set on a step by step illustration on how to open a gmail account as none actually had before delving on how to create blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and YouTube accounts. My choice for these tools was for the reason they are most used platforms online. For instance there are more than 126 million blogs on the internet, we have over 2 billion views on  YouTube videos, Facebook has over 500 million users and at least 50% of these make a log in daily and over 65 million tweets are sent daily. Hence maximizing on these four channels is of paramount importance. More so, I realized they are very green in to the world of online media and hence a step by step usage of these tools was important.

On the second day, we delved in to the social media strategy meant to help pave way for their online engagement. This was in a detailed process looking at their social media goal/objective, their target audience, sample work plan, monitoring and evaluation, measuring impact and risk control process.

Achievements
By the end of the training, the participants were able to:

• Operate their twitter accounts. In total 9 all of them created their accounts. I encouraged them to experiment with their own accounts before embarking on their institutional one.
• They were able to upload videos on YouTube and foster conversation and engagement on the already existing ones.
• They were able to create a Facebook page “Kwale Arts “though new and modification is ongoing. Feel free to drop a like on the same page.
• They learnt how to create a blog using blogger.

Projections
After a week deliberation, the group will come up with a social media strategy which will help them in their engagement online. I will step in to help them get on their feet as pertains all these social media channels.