Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project

Improving the Linkage between Legume-based Increased Agricultural Production, Food Security and Child Nutritional Status: Building on Local Knowledge

Introduction

The Soils, Food & Healthy Communities project (SFHC) has been running in Ekwendeni, Malawi since 2000. It is led by Dr. Rachel Bezner Kerr. Through participatory research, SFHC tests legume systems and uses an ecosystem approach to understanding linkages between food security and health.

HealthBridge has been providing technical support to the project since 2001.

In a first phase of the SFHC project (2001-2004), participatory research identified legume options (intercropping and serial cropping of soyabeans, groundnuts, pigeon peas, etc) that were the most useful for improving soil fertility, food security and child nutrition. In the second phase (2004-2007), the promotion of the correct use of these legume options was intensified. The main contribution of HealthBridge in this research project was to help test the child health benefits of the intervention.

Objectives

The overall goal was to improve child nutrition and make household food as safe as possible for resource-poor farmers through the increased use of legumes in the area surrounding Ekwendeni, near Mzuzu, in northern Malawi.

Results

Numerous research results have come out of this research, including research on experimental agriculture, social relations, and child health (see publication list at http://geography.uwo.ca/faculty/beznerkerrr/).

For the research with which HealthBridge was involved, the most important results may be summarized as:

• Unhealthy child feeding practices, in particular, early introduction of porridge into the child's diet, are associated with poorer child growth, reflecting poorer child health (see page 90 at http://www.unu.edu/unupress/food/FNBv28n1_regular_Final.pdf).
• The intervention was effective in improving child growth, reflecting improved child health, especially in those villages which have participated for the longest time and have been involved most intensely.

Recommendations

• In brief, to promote change in behaviour it is essential to understand who has the power to make the changes. In the case of child feeding, it is often not the mothers who decide when to introduce foods to their child, but rather their mother-in-laws. Mothers-in-law must be targeted in child feeding interventions.
• Ecohealth approaches to development and research have many benefits (engage and empower communities, fuller model complexity of ecosystem, higher likelihood of sustainable impacts), but they can take years of intense effort for impact to be observed. But because the impacts are sustainable and help address the underlying problems (in the SFHC case, low soil fertility and inappropriate child feeding) the effort should be considered cost-effective and worthwhile.