How is it possible to boost nutrition and reduce poverty? How can vulnerable people get access to nutritious foods on a long-term basis? These are some of the questions being addressed in an integrated and sustainable way by our Biofortification Project in the Gambia, or Baluu Tim-Maring-Ngo project as it is known in Wolof, the local language.
Muhammed and Jaye are two of the thousands of people our project has empowered.
Muhammed is just three years old and lost his mother when he was a baby. He’s being raised by his grandmother, Jaye, but in a country of food shortages, getting enough to eat with the required nutrients is a real struggle.
Our project is aimed at reaching women and the under-fives who are especially vulnerable (like Muhammed and Jaye), by increasing their access to, and encouraging them to eat, fortified foods high in vitamins and minerals.
Biofortification involves improving the nutritional quality of food crops through agricultural practices, such as plant breeding. It aims to increase nutritional levels in crops as they grow, rather than through processing or cooking. The project combines a focus on agriculture with an emphasis on healthier ways of food preparation and cooking, to improve nutritional content of food and boost public health.
Transforming nutritional health through a nationwide network of Mother Clubs
Another strategy for encouraging babies and toddlers to grow up healthily has involved establishing or strengthening 300 ‘Mother Clubs’ across the country. The rate of child mortality has decreased by over 50% in the last decade, but it is sadly still common for young children to die in the Gambia due to limited knowledge of nutrition and support offered to address this.
Our Mother Clubs promote nutrition education, through sharing information and offering cooking demonstrations that show ways of preparing healthy and nutritionally balanced food. We work closely with women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, but also involve all women of child-bearing age.
Through these clubs, current and future mothers learn how to prepare healthy and nutrient-packed food that make up a balanced diet, to give their babies and toddlers the best possible start, at the most crucial time in their development.
“I could go on talking about our Club all day!”
Above: Three-year-old Muhammed is happy and healthy.
Muhammed and Jaye are just two of the thousands of rural people who have benefited from our Mother Clubs project. When Jaye stepped in to bring Muhammed up, she found herself confused and at a loss. Having weaned her own children many years earlier, she was not sure how to go about feeding her young grandson without breastfeeding. She explains how their involvement in the Club has been invaluable to helping her find a solution:
“Before I joined the Club, I had limited knowledge on how to prepare proper food for babies under three months old. The support of the Mother Club and training on how to prepare nutritious and healthy wholegrain porridge and healthy feeding practices, helped bring him up to this level.
“Before the start of the Mother Club, it used to be very difficult to bring up babies that had lost their mothers as there was no support. Many died due to limited knowledge and support. The importance of the Club to our community cannot be over-emphasised. I can go on talking about our Club all day!”
Context
Baluu Tim-Maring-Ngo is a four-year EU-funded project to improve the nutrition and food security of 18,000 rural households in five regions of the Gambia. UP is working in close partnership with six local NGOs and four marketing federations to deliver this project. Find out more about UP’s work in West Africa this way.