Capacity Building

For the SCLANSA-FVC project, capacity building was a vital component as it it increased the likelihood of overall project success as well as the betterment of all stakeholders involved. Appropriate techniques at different levels were employed to ensure capacity building. These techniques included nutrition education learning events for adults, nutrient-dense product and processing workshops and enumerator training in nutrition assessment, to name a few. Below is a quantitative summary of the people the project reached through capacity building activities over the project duration.

Through collaboration, the Phillips 66 methodology for large group learning was adapted to focus on nutrition-related project objectives by stimulating discussion and community engagement for maximum participation. The Phillips 66 methodology requires participants to be divided into groups of six and given a topic to discuss for six minutes. This technique allowed people who did not read or write to fully participate in the proceedings of the events.

The education learning events for adults were conducted over five days in both Zambia (4-9 April, 2018) and Malawi (17-21 April, 2018). Due to the methodology, these events were able to reach a large number of participants in a short time and thus, targeted the full 1200 households per country with 77% (922 participants) and 67% (799 participants) in attendance in Zambia and Malawi respectively.

From the discussion activities held it was clear that most people were unaware of the importance of eating diverse foods as well as the relationship between foods consumed and their effects on the body. Most participants only thought food entering the stomach and the sensation of feeling full were the only important things when it came to food. In addition, most participants were only concerned having actual food on their plates to satisfy them and thoughts about food’s function in the body was of no concern. This explained why there was a lack of food diversity in these communities. Another important finding within households was that there was a hierarchy of food importance for the individuals with children’s diets having a lower priority when compared to other family members’ diets. In fact, parents who attended the learning event acknowledged that most of their children were sent to school without anything to eat even though they walked 2-4 kilometres to and from school and were required to some labour (like cutting grass) after school.

Activities conducted to develop nutrient-dense food products were implemented through participatory action research and designed to develop capacities among project participants by modifying recipes often taken for granted or changing dietary patterns and products. Thus, all households that attended SCLANSA-FVC trainings and workshops actively learned and developed their capacities. Given the high acceptance results from the acceptability and sensory evaluations conducted as well as the approach to process nutrient-dense foods at the household level, these trainings and workshops were intensified and successfully conducted in the second year of the project.

The training of enumerators in December 2016 and 2018 was a means to build the capacity particularly of youth, to conduct household diet diversity surveys. In both countries the students, mainly with university-level qualifications, were selected and given the opportunity to build their skill set in qualitative data collection as well as build up their resumes while serving as enumerators.

To intensify knowledge sharing, two building in Zambia were renovated and transformed into community-based training centres to house processing equipment like peanut butter machines and hand grinders. These products were commercialised at both household and market levels as a means to build the capacity level of farmers who we helped acquire the product certificates and permits to supply processed products to the market. In addition, two Accumulated Savings and Credit Associations (ASCAS) were formed as a way to enhance sustainability of these community processing centres and the activities around them. These groups enabled and continue to enable the smallholder farmers to access small loans that as a result, encourage the mobilisation of funds in a bid to ensure the continued operations of the processing centres while fostering the cohesion amongst them.

To discuss opportunities and barriers for upscaling the production of nutrient-dense powders, processing and storage workshops were conducted in both Zambia (July 2017) and Malawi (September 2017) which helped build capacity of local and regional government officers. To build capacity of local universities, two staff members from University of Zambia and Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources visited McGill for three months to do research. This research strengthened collaboration between the universities and McGill and gave the staff access to research equipment and allowed them to interact with other researchers in the food system field.