World Vegetable Center in partnership with local collaborators have developed appropriate vegetable seed kits along with participatory training systems for the production of nutritious vegetables through home gardens. Significant attention has been focused on women as managers of home gardens and household diets through campaigns including nutrition awareness and sound household sanitation.

This is a USAID Feed the Future initiative with the objective of contributing to behaviour changes which reduce malnutrition especially of women and children, through diet diversification, by promoting the production and consumption of nutritious vegetables containing essential vitamins and micronutrients such as iron, folate and zinc, and vitamins A and C.

The project has partnered with Akvo to utlize Akvo Flow as the survey tool of choice to monitor the training, technical assistance and uptake of technologies of agriculture and nutrition concepts by household garden project clients. 

In Year 1 (2016) over 1300 households took up improved agriculture and nutrition activities and were monitored through Akvo. This resulted in the accumulation of over 13,000 individual data records captured about client characteristics, training activities and importantly the technical assistance they received and sort from the project. 

Using this tool we were able to capture an enormous amount of data in a short period of time which allowed us to understand quickly what was the immediate situation in the field. One key example included the high demand from clients for technical assistance in IPM techniques and a low demand for continued assistance with garden bed preparation and variety selection. This immediate feedback enabled the project to adjust internal resources to focus more on IPM technical awareness, to quickly reflect requirements on the ground. A traditional paper based survey would not be so responsive.

This Immediate responsiveness is an example of what is needed in developing rural communities if horticulture is to be sustainably intensified for both nutrition and commercial purposes. Lessoned learned from Year 1 have led to an increased use of Akvo with more detailed monitoring to occur in Year 2 to quickly record and respond to garden production and nutrition issues as they occur. 

The project is committed to open data access for our project partners. With this in mind we are currently developing data cleaning, analysis and visualization resources primarily through R (RStudio and associated packages) for the stream of data that will flow in from regular field surveys by our project partners in Year 2. 

Our project partners will have access to "snapshots" of the data for their own immediate response strategies in the field and for longer term planning and reporting. These snapshots are being developed in R through the opensource web application data visualization framework called Shiny to provide our partners with interactive views of the collected data.

Too often data is hidden or inaccessable to the most important in-country project partners. The sustainabale intensification of horticulture in the developing world requires open access to data in a format that is accessible and timely to promote immmediate action rather than delayed responses when the issue at hand is often a rapidly evolving concept.

Stuart Brown
Project Manager
World Vegetable Center
Email: [email protected]