Reversing Chronic Malnutrition Starts Inside the Home
Issa Abdulla’s sons, 10-year-old Nuhu and 7-year-old Sam, love dinners made with rabbit meat most. So the father of three (Sam and Nuhu have a 19-month-old sister named Tunda) gave each of his sons a rabbit of their own to raise and slaughter. “They’re excited about it,” Abdulla assured as his sons peeked around a tree outside the family’s small home in Towero, Tanzania.
The boys’ rabbits came from litters the family raised in small pens they learned to build with the Mwanzo Bora Nutrition Program. They’ve been raising rabbits for four years and had 10 when I visited with them last month. Abdulla said they usually have more, but had recently sold many of the rabbits. Each litter of bunnies born to the small colony consists of seven or eight kits, and each grows to weigh as much as 13 pounds by the time Abdulla processes them for the family’s consumption. In all, he says they eat rabbit about twice a month and sell the rest for petty cash to put towards other expenses.
Unfortunately, Abdulla’s family didn’t always eat such a varied diet – or have such a robust income from their efforts. Before participating in training through the program, they ate ugali (a dense ball made of maize flour and water, staple fare for locals) and beans for virtually every meal.
They fed their children differently as well. Nuhu, the oldest, was breastfed for only four months and then transitioned to a porridge-based diet, but his young sister, Tunda, has benefited from six months of exclusive breast feeding and a variety of vegetables thereafter. Tunda now eats the same meals as the rest of the family while still supplementally breastfeeding.
Abdulla and his family are better off than many afflicted with extreme poverty. His wife, Ramia, said she feeds her family three meals per day, where just one or two is common for others. They’re also regularly consuming a variety of meats and vegetables, making them an exception even within their own village.
Homogeneity in the diet is among the primary hurdles Tanzania faces in reversing chronic malnutrition. Though food shortages are not unknown to Tanzanians, all the experts I met with over the course of nine days in the country agree: fundamental behavior shifts are far more difficult to accomplish than even not-so-simple snags in the supply chain.
A maize and bean diet like the one Abdulla and his family used to consume is so entrenched in Tanzanian culture that convincing people to incorporate more vegetables into their lifestyle is arduous work.
At its root, it’s a problem that can be seen reflected all over Tanzania. While the lack of resources common to developing nations is not an insignificant problem here, overcoming deeply rooted cultural preconceptions is a far more complex problem facing organizations on the ground.
In villages around the northern Tanzania city of Arusha, where One Acre Fund Tanzania Country Director David Hylden and his staff work to help farmers bring better yields from their fields, it is not uncommon for a farmer to opt out of expanding the program’s offerings into all of his fields despite being happy with the outcome of its implementation on a portion of his land.
“It’s definitely a problem we face,” Hylden said. “They’ll get a little bit more and they’ll just say, ‘well, this is enough,’ and they won’t want to add any more than that to the program.”
Though many of the farmers One Acre Fund works with have more than one acre of land, they’re encouraged to sign up for just one acre to begin with. Since farmers purchase their inputs from One Acre Fund, the barrier to entry is lower this way, and, in theory, farmers are able to see the benefit of their investment the first year without over-extending their resources. But getting farmers over that psychological roadblock after the first year is difficult.
Tanzania’s government has been strongly promoting commercial agriculture as a path to prosperity for its citizens; seeking investment from individuals, companies and organizations from both within Tanzania and abroad. While they’re quick to tout the infrastructure improvements that have been made, and the legislative hurdles that have been removed (export bans on commodities are no longer in place, for instance), it’s a fundamental psychological foe that stands most firmly in their way.
First, farmers have to produce more. Then, people have to consume it. In both cases, the government is at least right about one thing: the infrastructure to make it happen exists. Unfortunately, cultural perceptions cannot be built quickly like highways – contracted out to the lowest bidder, and paved over top of a centuries-old foundation.
Cultural perceptions shift slowly; often over generations, not months or even years. Families like Abdulla’s are helping the progress here though. When asked what their neighbors thought of their new eating habits, Ramia assured us they “like what they see.”
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