Tag Archives: HFP

Baseline: Day 14 (VMF)

This afternoon our anthropometry and hemoglobin analysis stations were set up at the home of a Village Model Farm (VMF). I was really excited because I hadn’t seen a VMF yet, AND because our VMF concept just received press as of yesterday! (Click here to read an article about FoF in the New Agriculturalist) I had the chance to speak with the VMF representative in the village of Svay Trai, and thought I would share what I learned on the blog.

The backstory: Sophal Eab used to be a wedding stylist, but when her children were old enough to attend school, she needed a job that required less travel. When the opportunity to have the VMF in her village arose, she took it. Until her farm is up and running, she sells corn for income. She purchases 500 ears of corn for $40 USD from her local market (160,000 Riel at 320 Riel/ear). She then boils all of the corn and sells it from a stand in front of her house for 500 Riel per ear (sometimes she has to sell it for less if it’s not good quality corn). Taking the cost of fuel into account, she makes roughly 100 Riel per ear, leaving her with a profit margin of anywhere from  50,000 Riel ($12.5 USD) per day to 100,000 Riel ($25 USD) per day depending on the quality of the corn available at the market.

Sophal's corn stand.

A happy customer!

Making the most of leftovers.

Sophal has already impressed FoF with her dedication. Within one month she has raised the height of the land on her property to better support the beds needed to grow fruit and vegetables. She purchased wire and sourced local bamboo to make a fence to keep animals off of her farm. She also bought mango seeds so she could start growing mangoes. Luckily, she already had a fishpond, but she is considering expanding it. FoF will provide her with other seeds for her farm and fingerlings (small fish) for her pond. For now, all she knows is that she has to grow a variety of fruit and vegetables and follow the guidelines given to her by HKI and FoF, but she is looking forward to her training. She hopes to grow enough of her own corn so that she can increase the profit margin of her corn stand by not having to purchase corn from the market.

The back of Sophal's farm.

Facing Sophal's house from the back of the farm.

The fishpond that was already at Sophal's house.

The new fence is working out quite well!

The VMF will play a very important role in FoF. Each village will have a VMF, and the VMFs in the aquaculture villages will also have a fishpond. The VMF representative will be a woman who receives training and inputs as part of our intervention. She will learn about homestead food production (HFP), aquaculture, and sustainable agricultural practices. There will be a marketing component to her training that will include information on how to plan the planting and harvesting of crops according to the seasons (of which there are 2 here – wet and dry), how to price crops, how to pick a good market to sell her produce, and how to form a marketing group to share information with VMF representatives from other villages. For instance, the marketing group may discourage women from growing morning glory (a common leafy green vegetable here) because it can be grown anywhere and with little input, so it doesn’t fetch a good price at the market. There will also be gender-specific training, as one of our goals is to empower women by improving both their health and their opportunities for income. The VMF representative will teach the FoF households in her village how to use their new farms and fishponds. Her knowledge will be e a local resource for other households in the village. She will be monitored every 4 months by FoF to see how her farm, her fishpond, and her “students” (the other FoF households in her village) are doing.

There is also a nutrition education component of our project that is being carried out by Village Health Volunteers (VHVs). The details, however, are another story for another day.

Baseline: The Survey

My apologies for not posting over the past few days. The posts I’ve planned for the next week take longer to write as they involve some research.

Anyways, to recap: I’ve discussed how we picked the households for FoF and what it’s like to be out in the field. I’ve also briefly mentioned what the purpose of our project is: to improve household food security and the nutritional status of women and children in rural Cambodia by combining HFP and aquaculture (it says so on the site’s banner). The word baseline keeps popping up – in post titles, categories, my writing. But what IS baseline? What are we trying to measure, and how are we measuring it? These are the questions I’ll be answering in my next few posts.

All 900 houses are completing a one-hour survey during baseline. The enumerators have a set of questions they work through, as well as a guide that explains how to record answers. When all of the questions have been answers, the women and any of their children under the age of 5 make their way to the anthropometry station to be measured and pricked. This process will be repeated after the intervention (ie after the farms and fish ponds have been established) during what is called the endline survey.

Half of the women are also completing 24-hour recalls and providing blood samples. I’ll discuss this another day.

Going back to the survey – what are we asking the women? What information do we hope to obtain from their answers?

The survey is divided into 8 modules: Household Information, Water and Sanitation, Homestead Food Production (subcategory: animal raising), Food Consumption, Mother’s Nutrition and Health, Knowledge and Attitudes, Household Food Security, and Measurements and Hemoglobin. The first 7 modules contain questions asked during the interview, and the last module is filled in by the enumerators trained in anthropometry and hemoglobin analysis.

Module 1: Household information

Here we try to ascertain the main characteristics of the household. We want to know how many people live in the house, the highest level of education obtained by the mother and father, annual income, who makes decisions about income, health care, and other important issues (mother, father, both?), what material goods the house has, and what materials the house is made out of. These questions provide a detailed picture of the family’s socioeconomic status.

Module 2: Water and Sanitation

We want to learn about the family’s hygiene (how often they use soap, where they go to the bathroom), and whether or not they have decent access to clean water.

Module 3: Homestead Food Production

We are trying to establish what kind of food, if any, people grow for their own use and to sell. This includes gardens, fishponds, and animal raising. This helps us gain insight into a variety of things, such as what food is available in a household, how familiar people are with HFP and aquaculture, what kind of income they make.

Module 4: Food Consumption

The most direct way of assessing nutritional status. We want to know what people eat, and how often. Because of our interest in aquaculture, we want to get as specific as possible when discussing fish. Therefore we ask people if they consume 10 common species of fish (5 big, 5 small), and we also leave room for any species not on the list. To help with this section, all enumerators carry a fish atlas with them, which has pictures of 36 fish common in Cambodia for easy identification of species consumed. We also want to know what nutrients they are or aren’t getting. Our questions specifically ask about dark, leafy greens (iron), fruit and vegetables with orange insides (vitamin A), grains (carbohydrates), organ meats (iron, protein), animal protein and oil, fat, and butter (dietary fat). Finally, we want to know where their food comes from (home, market, gift).

Module 5: Mother’s Nutrition and Health

The purpose of this section is to look at anemia and pregnancy. We ask if/when women have taken iron tablets, and we write down their current pregnancy status (not pregnant, or pregnant and how many months along they are). We also have a question about night blindness during pregnancy, as night blindness is a strong indicator of vitamin A deficiency.

Module 6: Knowledge and Attitudes – This is where we assess what women know about proper nutrition for themselves and their children. We ask how much they think they should feed their children, when they should introduce solid food, and if they can identify which foods are good sources of certain nutrients such as vitamin A and iron.

Module 7: Household Food Security – The last module in our survey tries to determine how food secure a household is by asking women if they worry about getting enough food for their family, or the right kinds of food, and whether or not they sometimes have to skip meals or eat famine foods (foods that make you feel full but don’t provide a decent amount of nutrients).

Hopefully this provides some insight into the kind of data we are collecting during baseline and why we care about this information. I’m going to try to film videos in the field tomorrow. Between my iPhone, laptop, and camera, I should be able to get some footage. Wish me luck!

Introducing FoF!

FoF was formally announced in a press release by the International Development Research Centre (IRDC) on June 20, 2012. You can view the full text here:

www.idrc.ca/EN/Media/Pages/CIFSRF-june-release.aspx

We’re thrilled to be one of the 6 projects chosen this year to receive funding from the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund (CIFSRF), a $62 million fund established with the goal of improving food security in developing countries and providing research opportunities for Canadian scientists.

The Vancouver Sun gave an excellent overview of our project. Some of the key points include:

  • The magnitude of our project – it will cover 900 households randomly divided into three groups: a homestead food production (HFP) group that will grow nutritious fruits and vegetables, an aquaculture group that will raise fish to consume and sell (in addition to HFP), and a control group.
  • Our commitment to ending hidden hunger – nutrient deficiencies that aren’t obvious to the naked eye. In rural Cambodia, these nutrients are essential fatty acids, protein, Iron, Vitamin A, and Zinc. When these are lacking in sufficient quantities in the diet, pregnancy is risky to both the mother and the fetus, and children face several challenges as they grow.
  • The gender element – many of these households are run by women, and helping them grow diverse, nutrient-rich plants and animals should improve their health and economic situation, which will also benefit the entire household.
  • The biggest expense – transporting blood samples for analysis to see if our interventions have had an impact on the nutritional status of the households we are studying. Measuring changes in nutrient levels in the blood before and after the project will provide concrete evidence that our interventions are worth investing in for future development.

You can find the full article here:

www.vancouversun.com/health/researchers+tackle+hidden+hunger+rural+Cambodia/6838343/story.html