From West Africa to Wales, parents across the world want the best for their children. One mother in The Gambia shares her delight over her young daughter’s improved health as a result of our nutrition intervention…

*Image: Kaddy is delighted with the progress her young daughter has made*

Kaddy Susso belongs to a Mother’s Club in Gunjur, The Gambia. These clubs provide a collective support system for mothers in the local communities and knowledge about the nutritional benefits of biofortified crops for their children.

Kaddy is also a member of her local market federation and has a plot of land at the community garden, as well as growing orange flesh sweet potatoes in her back garden. This provides her with a convenient source of nutrients just metres away: “I add them to my dishes regularly, I can easily pick from the plant and it means I have ready-made nutritional ingredients that are accessible”.

Cooking and community

Kaddy is also growing biofortified wholegrain pearl millet in her plot of land – both for her family to eat and also to sell. Though the mother club meetings she has learnt new skills on how to best prepare and preserve all of the nutritional value the millet holds: “I have learnt new ways of cooking pearl millet using this wholegrain variety, through cooking demonstration we have all learnt ways of cooking that otherwise we would have not known about. This also brings all the mothers in the local community together where we share ideas of cooking and increasing our children’s health.”

This has helped improve the health of Kaddy’s young daughter, who was malnourished before the project’s intervention. Now, through a combination of access to biofortified food, knowledge of how to prepare the crops, and an increased income from greater production yields, Kaddy has been able to feed her child plenty of nutritious food.

“We like food so much!”

Kaddy says: “Pre-project I was not comfortable due to my child’s poor health, she was always pale and had cracking skin. Now she is very happy, playful and growing in intelligence. I can now attend to other household needs as I am not constantly looking after her. These new crops have saved my daughter’s life. The clinic now always gives me the thumbs up when we go for a check, it is such a relief.”

Kaddy can now start looking positively towards the future. The additional crops she is growing has given her an increased and more regular income, and now that she has time to attend to her garden more regularly she believes this will only get better and better: “Through the gardens I can get lots more production. First and foremost I wanted to secure my family’s food security and make sure we are healthy, especially as we like food so much! Now I am able to take cuttings from my extra plating and grow even more, this will mean I have a greater income.”

All this has given Kaddy the confidence that her family is best prepared to fight COVID-19 and other diseases that can affect health and livelihoods.

Context:

The activities in this project took place as part of our emergency COVID response project in West Africa, funded by the Welsh Government. The project has focused on ensuring that immediate needs are met but has also built longer-term health resilience that will help families like Kaddy’s.