المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

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    • Here, I want to share two cases from rural and remote mountain region of Nepal with respect to Q3. Although it’s simple and small initiative, it makes us think about such initiatives with respect to improving nutrition of women and children. 

      In one of the remote districts of mid-west Nepal, woman farmers have now realized nutritional importance of growing vegetables instead of tobacco in their field. Under the Nutrition in Mountain Agro-ecosystems (NMA) project funded by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and jointly implemented by IFOAM-Organics International, FiBL and HELVETAS Swill Intercooperation, there is a ‘school nutrition garden’ micro-intervention which is being implemented by a local NGO: Women Upliftment and Awareness Centre (WUAC) in Mugu district. Under this micro-intervention, the students are taught about theoretical and practical knowledge and skill on nutrition and nutrition sensitive agriculture. Technical persons from District Agriculture Development Office, District Health Office also provide technical knowledge about, for instance, composting, importance of nutrients to human health, nutritional importance of local food and method to grow it, hygiene and sanitation to the students on monthly basis. This knowledge are being ultimately replicated in household level of the students. Their mothers – woman being nutrition gatekeeper of a family – learn such knowledge from their children. As a result, the greenery that was due to tobacco in their land is now replaced by seasonal and off-season vegetables, as mentioned in the paragraph below.

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      ‘Now we don’t plant tobacco now, rather cultivate leafy vegetables, carrot, fruits’

      - Mrs. Tara Khadka, Chairperson, School Nutrition Garden, Ima village, Mugu

      Earlier we used the leisure time after household chore in smoking tobacco. We used to plant tobacco leaves in our land; only the green in our land was tobacco. Even young girls used to consume it, and still many people consume it. After intervention of nutrition garden in our school, we knew about its health hazard from our children. We also got knowledge about health benefits of vegetable crops and its consumption; we knew about including vegetables, green leafy vegetables, fruits, meat, egg, pulse in our daily diet. From our children, we know about new technology to grow it. I have now started cultivating vegetables in small kitchen garden for household consumption. I also provide vegetables in day food for my children. I also sell excess vegetables in the local market – the earning has supported my family expense including health, children’s education.

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      Such type of intervention, in spite of its limited coverage, has been effective in changing behavior of people, particularly of women towards agriculture and nutrition, and is helping to improve nutrition of their children and family. Considering its bright side, District Education Office – for wider impact – has prepared a curriculum on nutrition and nutrition sensitive agriculture and is being taught to the students of grade 1-5 in 18 schools now. The District Education Office has decided to teach the course to the students of grade 1-10 in all schools from the fiscal year 2018/019 in the district.

      The NMA project is promoting and scaling-up such nutrition sensitive agricultural practices in mountain agro-ecosystems through an action network of empowered rural service providers (RSPs), which is named as Mountain Agro-ecosystems Action Network - MAAN (https://maan.ifoam.bio).

      Similarly, some of the RSPs involved in MAAN are also using various types of role play and demonstration to improve the nutrition of children and mothers of golden 1000 days and reduce gender discrimination in remote rural mountain in Nepal. In the region, there is a big gap in nutrition among pregnant, lactating women and children under the age of 5 years. Usually, Nepali women have many different tasks at household level: caring for their children, preparing food, collecting firewood and water, sometimes looking after the livestock, and a lot more tasks. The challenge is that they go on with these tasks during their pregnancy and the lactating time. Women face serious health problems and risk the life of the baby (by having a uterine prolapse). Among the local people, the relation between the workload of pregnant women and uterus prolapse is often not known and ignored.

      To make families and especially men aware of women’s burden, their own and their child’s need of care, and their need of a balance diet (especially during the 1000 golden days), the RSPs organized different role plays as part of local level food fair in Dailekh district. They invited the husbands of the intervention to join the role plays, and make them aware about the situation of their wives. During the role play, the men got some pillows under their clothes to feel a big belly and were ask to move around, miming typical work of women. In this way, they could feel some difficulties and realize the tasks of their wives. In the end, the people including local politicians asked men to be more cooperative with women in sharing household responsibilities and to ignore the so-called ‘natural’ division of work between men and women.

      Story I

      Story II

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      Another SDC-funded and HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation Nepal-implemented project – Sustainable Soil Management Programme (SSMP) – promoted simple and climate smart agricultural technologies in mid-hill regions of Nepal. Effect of these technologies in improving soil fertility and farm productivity and income is described in the attached file. Besides, to what extent these technologies were successful in reducing women’s workload and its ultimate effect in sharing workload between men and women is also mentioned with simple study in later part of the attached file.

      This paper was shared in national conference on climate smart agriculture organized by Ministry of Agriculture Development in August 2016 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

      See the attachments: