“Before, our food was like poison in our bodies, but now it is like medicine,” says Eunice Wango Manga, a farmer in Kitui County in Eastern Kenya. Her family and community are among the beneficiaries of an FAO project to make smallholder households eat better and grow foods that are more nutritious.
Eunice, 45, is one of 26 members – all but two of them are women – of a farmers’ self-help group. In late 2017 the group started receiving food and nutrition trainings as part of the FAO’s Increasing Smallholder Productivity and Profitability (ISPP) project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“Before, I was not able to walk long distances. We had a lot of sickness in our family; we would go to hospital frequently,” says Eunice, who is married with three children. “But now we are healthy and very active.”
The money they used to spend on hospital visits, Eunice and her husband are now spending on school for their children and on their farm. Recently, they bought a water pump for irrigation, saving them the cost of hiring someone to pump water to their fields.
Most people around here have been eating the wrong things for different reasons, Eunice says.
“Rich people would eat a lot of animal proteins and fats, while poor people would eat a lot of simple carbohydrates and salt. As a result, people were often getting sick. But the FAO trainings taught us how to balance our meals,” she says.
Eunice now grows kale, spinach, amaranth and tomatoes in her vegetable garden, and her family consumes them almost daily.
Besides being a farmer, Eunice is also a pastor. “Even in church, I teach people about a balanced diet,” Eunice says, enthusiastically. “People come to me and tell me they are not feeling well. Then I ask them how they eat and give them tips on how to improve their diets.”
