I thought I would share this article I wrote to give everyone a better picture of what the Nutrition Garden is all about. It is long but informative. This program, supported by individuals in Canada and the United States, was also the subject of my Master’s thesis. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at spoiledfornormal@gmail.com.
Case study of the Gamboula Nutrition Garden, Central African Republic
1. Background
The social impacts of the current crisis in the Central African Republic have been felt the hardest by women and children. The lack of health care, clean water and sanitation contributes to and exacerbates malnutrition among children. There is 38% global chronic malnutrition in the country, with which numerous long-term effects have been associated. Forty-three percent of the population, or 1.6 million people, are currently food insecure in CAR to date. This is not due to lack of land as only 4.4% of the arable land in CAR is currently in use. Rather, evidence points to the lack of variety in the diet coupled with the current insecurities in the country and the effects of the global economic crisis for the high level of food insecurity.
In an effort to help stem some of the underlying causes of malnutrition, Evangelical Covenant missionary Roy Danforth started a large fruit tree orchard behind the Gamboula II Eglise Evangélique Baptiste (EEB) hospital in 1998. The fruits produced were intended to provide food for the nutrition centre as well as provide an opportunity for hospital patients to become acquainted with new fruits introduced through a large scale agroforestry program in the area. In 2006, a nutrition garden was added to the orchard and the Women and Children Gardening for Health (WCGH) program was started.
The WCGH program is hosted by the Gamboula Nutrition Centre, a ministry of the EEB hospital in Gamboula, CAR. The hospital receives minimal outside funding and is based on a user-fee system. The nutrition centre charges patients per room and for other medical charges such as medicines, intravenous supplies or blood transfusions. All of the food is provided free and is supplied by the nutrition garden, by the World Food Program or via donations from expatriates living in the area. The nutrition centre treats, on average, one hundred children per year, though this figure is expected to be much higher for 2009. The physical effects of malnutrition, such as marasmus, kwashiorkor and chronic undernourishment, are treatable through remediation in the hospital’s nutrition centre. However, many families return to the same farming practices and the same lack of variety in the diet that contributed to the malnutrition in their family in the first place.
Gamboula is a town of around 5,000 people situated twenty-five kilometres from the border of Cameroon and thus in close proximity to thousands of Fulani refugees who fled from recent violence in the north. Gamboula itself is also host to hundreds of Fulani IDP’s and people of several other Bantu tribes. The primary occupation of the people in the region is subsistence farming, particularly after the closure of a large tobacco company that employed nearly five hundred people, as well as the closure of a large forestry camp in the nearby town of Bamba. Gamboula is situated on the main access road between the capital city of Cameroon, Yaoundé, and the capital of CAR, Bangui.
2. Purpose of the WCGH program
The WCGH program and the nutrition garden are uniquely situated to help children and their caregivers recover from severe malnutrition as well as provide training to caregivers to prevent the recurrence of malnutrition. The WCGH program serves two main functions. The nutrition garden provides food for the nutrition centre as a means to meet the immediate dietary needs of the children in the centre. In the nutrition centre, nutritious food is good medicine. In addition to introducing healthy foods into their diets, the garden also serves as a model for teaching mothers gardening techniques so that they and their families can begin or improve upon their own gardens and remain healthy. The WCGH program provides a machete, vegetable seeds, fruit tree seedlings and other planting material to each woman who completes ten hours of work/training in the nutrition garden.
3. Size and composition
The nutrition garden is approximately twelve acres in size and consists of seven acres of fruit trees and five acres of vegetable gardens and field crops. The fruit tree portion of the garden was planted in 1998 and the fruit is consumed by the nutrition centre while the seeds are saved for use in the fruit tree nursery of the Gamboula Agroforestry Program. Space for vegetable gardens and field crops was added in late 2005. Vegetable gardening is the main dry season activity while field crops such as beans, improved cassava, yam, sweet potato, peanuts, egusi melon, Fulani potato and corn are the focus of the rainy season.
4. Program Activities
Training – The WCGH program currently supports one full-time staff person who is responsible for the oversight of the garden, food production and training of the women from the nutrition centre. Women whose children are hospitalized are encouraged to work in the garden three days a week, during which time their ‘work’ is actually hands-on training combined with direct lessons. Each woman who completes ten hours of training is given a machete, vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings to take home.
Food production – All food produced in the nutrition garden is given to the nutrition centre. The nutrition centre relies on the food produced in the garden in order to care for the children in the centre. Without the garden the centre is at risk of closing due to lack of funds to purchase food. Excess food is given to the caregivers of the children, often women who are also malnourished and other children who are staying at the hospital with them. There is no food service at the hospital beyond what the nutrition garden provides. The nutrition centre staff teach women how to prepare crops introduced through the nutrition garden in culturally appropriate and palatable ways to aid in the adoption of these crops in the home garden.
Follow-up – Following up with women once they return home is essential to their success in incorporating what they have learned while participating in the WCGH program. Each woman is visited three times in the first year after leaving the hospital, in conjunction with the three growing seasons in the region.
Materials distribution – Each woman that participates in the WCGH program, completing ten hours of hands on training in the nutrition garden receives a machete, as well as vegetable seeds and fruit tree seedlings, according to her needs. Approximately half the caregivers attending to children in the nutrition centre participate in the WCGH program. Fruit trees were recently added to the list of materials that women could request to take home with them after hearing accounts of women taking seeds home from fruits they had eaten in the nutrition centre. Some women, whose children have a long stay in the hospital, some as long as three months, plant seeds in plastic sacks, placing them outside their rooms to grow. Many of the most popular fruit tree species seeds do not travel well, thus the decision to provide seedlings of fruit trees rather than seeds. The most sought after fruit trees in the nutrition garden include jackfruit, carambola, Madagascar plum, oil palm, breadfruit and canistel.
Experimentation – Within the space available in the nutrition garden, we undertake experiments in new gardening techniques as well as variety trials of species we would like to make available to the program’s beneficiaries. Experiments to date have included trial plots of inter-planted crops including papaya and pineapple; bananas, plantain, sweet potato and taro; vetiver mulch on vegetable beds; and yam cultivation. Variety trials included seventeen varieties of beans collected from Kenya, six cowpea varieties provided by ECHO as well as trials of other beans varieties gleaned from local markets, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While performing experiments in a demonstration/production garden is not ideal, as visitors may mistake trial crops for successful introductions, they do help promote the idea of local experimentation. Experiments planned for the future include trying different methods of seed preservation and storage and Moringa production and processing.
‘Serial staffing’ – Funding is by far the biggest limiting factor to the activities carried out in the nutrition garden. Currently, the program budget can only support two full time staff people, one sentry and funds to hire temporary labour when needed. The senior staff person is responsible for planning all of the garden’s activities, conducting follow-up, vegetable and fruit collection for the nutrition centre and training the women who participate in the WCGH program from the nutrition centre. In place of a second full-time staff person, the program hires women on a weekly rotation. In other words, each week one woman is hired to work for one week for a set salary to do various labour tasks in the garden under the oversight of the garden supervisor. Women who request work in the nutrition garden are added to a growing list of names. Each week, the first person on the list is notified of her up-coming week of work and she has the option at the end of the week to put her name back on the list, at the bottom. When this system was started the project already had a list of fifty-three women requesting work. This process, called ‘serial staffing’, meets several needs of the nutrition garden. First, it fills a need for temporary, unskilled labour in the nutrition garden, freeing the supervisor to conduct training or follow-up activities. Second, it helps the project fulfill its mandate of teaching women about adding variety to the families’ diet through gardening by exposing many more women from the community to the activities and crops of the nutrition garden. Through their week of work women are exposed to the various training activities, crops and techniques that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Third, serial staffing helps take the pressure off of the Central African staff to hire friends or relatives for a single full-time position, spreading the opportunity for work among more than fifty women in the community each year. It also allows the permanent staff the opportunity to observe who they may want to hire in the future based on their skill and work ethic displayed during their week of work in the garden.
Large tasks are accomplished by hiring groups of women to perform certain jobs on contract, with a set lump sum agreed upon for the work. The project most often hires women’s groups from local churches who are raising funds in order to attend or host conferences. Most often this task work is used for clearing fields for planting, making large amounts of compost or for weeding in the fruit tree orchard. Most recently, the project has started to include a training component in the task work, taking one hour in the beginning of the work project to teach on composting, tree planting or other important topics.
5. Challenges
Seed production is by far the biggest challenge for the nutrition garden. Many of the plants grown in the garden originate from seeds collected on trips throughout the Central African Republic and the Congo as well as seed sent from ECHO. These seeds are essentially irreplaceable and great care is taken in the nutrition garden to ensure that each time these crops are planted, a certain number of plants are set aside for seed collection rather than food production. However, crops set aside for seed collection are often harvested for food by hospital patients or their families out of desperation and hunger. The nutrition garden is often visited by people other than those connected to the nutrition centre and crops are often stolen, including those set aside for seed. The nutrition garden collects seed in order to replant in the garden as well as to distribute to WCGH participants.
In an effort to protect and preserve the garden’s valuable and often rare seeds, the project has started to engage local farmers in contract growing. Seeds are given to local farmers who are known to be good growers, with the understanding that the nutrition garden will buy whatever seed the farmer produces at a predetermined price. So far, contract growing has been tried for growing certain varieties of beans not available in local markets as well as some vegetables that are not common in local gardens. Issues of seed quality have yet to be addressed and standards will need to be put in place if the scale of contract growing for the nutrition garden grows. Along with seed production, the nutrition garden struggles with seed storage. Methods for seed storage gleaned from ECHO will be addressed in the coming year.
6. Conclusion
The Gamboula Nutrition Garden and its Women and Children Gardening for Health Program, is an example of how agricultural development can effectively intersect with relief. The WCGH program profits from the ‘captive audience’ of women tending to their malnourished children to introduce nutritious foods to their diet, expose women to greater diversity in the diet and garden as well as valuable nutrition training, all in an effort to prevent their subsequent children from becoming malnourished. In many cases desperation leads to opportunity. The same opportunities for intersecting development with relief exist in IDP or refugee camps, hospitals or schools. Given the right setting, projects similar to the Gamboula Nutrition Garden may be appropriate.
WCGH is a project of NMSI (www.nmsi.org) and CEFA (a non-denominational, non-for-profit organization registered in the Central African Republic).
