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| navigate: home: magazine: fall 1999: article | |
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Outreach Kenya Project teaches women to improve diet, health of their children By Celena E. Kusch | |||||||||||
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At least one-third of Kenyan children under the age of 5 suffer from moderate to severe malnutrition, while nearly 50 percent of the food harvested goes to waste or spoils before it can be eaten. During the weaning period, when infants make the transition from a diet of breast milk to solid foods, children may receive little more than cereal-based gruels. Nutritious weaning foods in the markets are considered luxury items, and many are imported from overseas. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Penn State, in partnership with Tuskeegee University and the University of Nairobi, has initiated a community development project designed to solve nutrition problems by producing and marketing locally manufactured nutritious weaning foods. The project aims to improve nutrition, create economic growth and promote democratization in rural Kenya. Since Kenyan women provide up to 90 percent of the agricultural labor, food processing and marketing in many areas of the country, the project engages local women in the Bomet and Murang’a districts through the establishment of Nutribusiness Cooperatives. These cooperatives develop, process and market culturally appropriate weaning foods. Penn State’s Dr. Audrey Maretzki, professor of food science and nutrition in the College of Agricultural Sciences, directs the project. “We know the women in this area can grow the crops. They are extremely productive agriculturalists, but they have to be in a position where they can add value to the crop to sell it. The Nutribusiness Development Project shows them how to do that in a way that can also improve the health and nutrition of children in the area,” Maretzki said. Women’s groups are common in Kenyan communities. In traditional informal groups, women go from farm to farm helping to cultivate each other’s crops. Other groups collect a monthly fee from each woman then pass the funds through the group round-robin to provide the women with enough money to make major purchases, like roofing a home or just buying pots and pans. More formal groups might even operate a shop or construct and rent out buildings. All the buildings in some towns are owned by women’s groups and rented out to the communities. Women’s groups play a national role in community economic development in communities. “These cooperatives act as legal entities with property rights,” Maretzki explained. “This allows the women to set aside their money and earnings from their gardens, rather than turning it over to their husbands. With increased buying and investment ability, the women have the power to generate real economic growth in their regions.” According to Maretzki, the project chose to build on the strengths of women’s groups and on traditional means of organizing. The project invited established women’s groups to become part of one of two Nutribusiness Cooperatives. Each cooperative district is divided into sublocations—four in Bomet and three in Murang’a. Almost 100 women’s groups from those areas, including needy women’s groups organized by the project, send a representative and an alternate to a sublocational council. Officers from each council comprise the Cooperative Board for each site. Together more than 2,500 members from Bomet and Murang’a form the Nutribusiness Network, a real achievement because the women in each group come from politically opposed tribes, Maretzki added. Beyond tribal differences, groups are religiously and linguistically diverse. Most of the women are Christian, but some are Muslim, leading to potential conflicts when scheduling workshops around holidays. Many women know enough English to interact during the workshops, but the project must employ field coordinators to provide translations into Kiswahili or any of a number of local dialects. Despite these obstacles, the project is using University resources and technical assistance to help the women’s groups develop the food processing, business management and marketing skills needed to assure the success of the venture. “Our project is to create University development linkages, not to generate economic development in Kenya using business models,” Maretzki said. “We didn’t want to send in a Western manager to run the operation. We wanted to build a sustainable development project by connecting local people and products with the local support they need to succeed. The women make all the decisions. It’s very participatory. Penn State and the other universities are there to provide the necessary education and science to back up those decisions, but the cooperatives really belong to the members. This is not the most efficient system for development, but it will be the most sustainable in the long run.” After forming the cooperatives, the project conducted a nutrition workshop providing charts of nutrient analysis for a variety of local produce. Once the women determined which ingredients they wanted to include based on the data, they worked in teams to create recipes while making careful records of what each recipe contained. They conducted two rounds of product making and tasting. Then, University laboratories analyzed the nutritional content of the recipes to ensure compliance with nutritional standards, paying special attention to vitamin A content, which is traditionally lacking in Kenyan children’s diets. After they produced the product, another workshop dealt with quality control and consistency, including working with standard instruments for measurement. Other workshops discussed the threat of pesticide and bacterial contamination. The women chose to reduce risk by eliminating foods that needed pesticides to grow year-round. In addition, they created a product that must be cooked before being eaten, eliminating the bulk of the bacterial threat. Once they completed the production phases of the project, other workshops taught cooperative members principles of food processing, marketing and distribution while the factories were being built. Due to lack of electricity in the region and the women’s concern for fuel conservation, all manufacturing equipment must be hand-operated. The project purchased a de-huller for maize and a posho mill, a labor-saving hammer mill, for turning grain into flour. These mills are at the center of most communities and create profit for the owners in the form of both money and grain. The cooperatives have used these mills to generate initial revenue before the product is ready to market. To meet other production needs, the project had to design and manufacture its own equipment, including a vegetable slicer, flour mixer to create a homogeneous product, filling equipment, a carrot scrubber and a solar drier for the vegetables. The project formed a partnership with the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute to produce the drier and other equipment, including stainless steel tables and kitchen counters. Stephen Kieras, Penn State graduate student in food science, and George Otieno, an engineering graduate from the University of Nairobi, produced the designs for the equipment. The solar drier is “probably the most sophisticated in all of Kenya,” Maretzki explained. Using batteries to store the energy from solar panels, black woven blankets filter dust out of the heated air which solar fans then carry over the vegetables to dry them. Additional reflectors will focus more solar heat onto the collectors and raise the temperature. The drier is so efficient that the cooperative has plans to use its excess energy to run fans and a light bulb within the plant. “At this stage, the project has all the elements of success. If it can succeed in Bomet where every day poses a new obstacle, it will be a model for University outreach in developing countries,” Maretzki said. Throughout the project, obstacles have plagued both communities. Challenges have included a lack of potable water—necessitating the hand-digging of two kilometers of trenches—as well as problems finding reliable drivers, difficulty in designing a suitable solar drier and even the loss of a key project leader. Dr. Gabriel Maritim of the University of Nairobi, who provided much of the impetus for this project, died in October 1998. Helped by women in the Bomet area to go to the United States for his education, Maritim orchestrated the three-university collaboration as a way to repay a debt to his community. With his death, many thought the project would end, Maretzki said, but the cooperatives have remained strong and have even gone on to make significant progress since last fall. “It’s nice to see that even with the death of our colleague, his hopes for this community are being fulfilled. He was the momentum and energy for the project, and everyone is honoring his memory by continuing his work,” Kieras added. Recently, cooperative members had an opportunity to follow the process all the way through from the purchase of produce to the production and packaging of porridge products. Kieras expressed his excitement at this achievement, saying, “The walk-through training session with the functioning solar drier was the convergence of many successes—the completion of the drier itself, the construction of the equipment and putting it in place at the site, and the collaboration of women from the two communities, coming together to learn the principles of manufacturing.” “This is the first time we have put all the pieces together, and it’s really quite impressive,” Maretzki said. From its inception, the economic development aspect of the Nutribusiness Development Project was designed for eventual financial self-sustainability with USAID funding providing the technical assistance to create nutritious weaning food products and to equip the facilities in which these products would be processed. Project funding ends in December 1999, and the cooperatives plan to have the product in the market by this fall. “Although the cooperatives have not yet sent their first product to market, this model has been such a success just at the level of democratization and cooperation that USAID has asked us to submit a proposal to expand the project by linking the cooperatives to new groups in two new regions so the women can teach each other,” Maretzki said. “Creating dialogue and interaction between the two groups has also helped to deal with tribal issues. On the initial cross-site visit, Murang’a women sent Bomet women home with so many garden cuttings that the plants’ weight bent the roof.” The USAID Mission in Kenya has provided additional assistance in the amount of $100,000 over the next two years to enable the cooperatives to create and implement their business plans for introducing the weaning food products into district markets in the Rift Valley and central provinces. During this period the linkage between Penn State and the University of Nairobi will be maintained through the involvement of Maretzki as a project consultant. Penn State is also attempting to facilitate an industrial attachment for a University of Nairobi librarian who is pursuing a diploma program in information systems management in Kenya. Faculty and students from around Penn State have contributed to the Nutribusiness Development Project. Important connections have been with The Mary Jean and Frank P. Smeal College of Business Administration, the Penn State College of Medicine at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, the departments of Anthropology, Horticulture, Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, Nutrition and Food Science, and the University Libraries. Representatives convene as an advisory committee to receive updates and provide input to the project. Five Penn State faculty and three graduate students have made site visits to conduct research and provide teaching and support to the cooperatives. Visiting faculty include Maretzki; Dr. Ramaswamy Anantheswaran, associate professor of food science; Dr. Marleni Ramirez, research associate in the Department of Food Science; Dr. W. LaMarr Kopp, professor emeritus and retired deputy vice president for international programs; and Dr. Stephen Knabel, associate professor of food science. An outreach program of the College of Agricultural Sciences | ||||||||||
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