UNNOTICED GLOBAL developments are something of an obsession with me. I had my attention stirred recently by a lot of media attention that focused on the whole continent of Africa being officially expected to lower its economic growth-rate this year. But I was stirred even more (with angry disappointment) by how few media outlets stressed how phenomenally high the continent’s growth-rate has been over the past twenty years.
That high growth was impishly referred to by my old boss, former United Nations leader Kofi Annan from Ghana, as “Africa’s clean little secret”).
Africa of course is made up of 54 countries, and each is a varied and multifaceted story in itself. I’ve been especially taken with one story that, true to form, has gone unreported in mainstream US media.
My colleagues at UMCOR, the America-based United Methodist Committee on Relief, are supporting a project improve farming and – quite fundamentally and radically – people’s day-to-day nutritional practice in The Gambia … a country that certainly qualifies as under-noticed in much of the western world.
The Gambia is that narrow strip of land that runs in from the Atlantic along each side of the Gambia River, and is among the most impoverished and food-insecure nations in Africa. Some 53% of Gambians live in extreme poverty, and it rightly counts as a “Low-Income Food-Deficit Country” on the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s global list.
The UMCOR project is helping local farmers to reverse the most harmful effects of that long-entrenched food insecurity. (One pervasive and very visible effect has been the widespread stunting of Gambian children’s growth, a painful sight to see everywhere you go).
In 2014, late onset and severe shortage of rains made The Gambia’s situation more acute, with a drastic reduction in crop production, and cereal, rice, and groundnut harvests being especially cut back in volume.
UMCOR works with a partner agency, Concern International, to help Gambian farmers improve the quality of their soil and other essential planting conditions and so upgrade their food-producing ability, in a range of ways.
“A great thing about this project is that it engages farmers as experimenters and creators of knowledge—not simply as the recipients of knowledge,” says Alice Mar, executive secretary for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at UMCOR.
THROUGH EXTENSIVE FIELD TRIALS and networks of seed-exchanges that enable experimenting with different crop varieties, the project builds on the wealth of expertise that farmers already possess, and offers the chance for them to further enhance their knowledge base.
“They learn even more,” Mar notes, “and pass on that increased knowledge among their neighbors and the wider farming community.”
Mar has been further impressed by the emphasis on improving the nutritional value of crops. Nutrition training will accompany the agricultural work. It’s an aspect of up-to-date food aid that still gets little attention in non-specialist media, despite its radical and, to many people, surprising impact.
“It’s easy to assume that increased food production will automatically lead to improved household nutrition,” Mar points out, “but we have seen that this is not necessarily the case. Food consumption and nutritional status are impacted by many factors, including gender norms, cultural beliefs, dietary and hygiene practices, nutritional knowledge, and other factors.”
As part of the effort to bolster families’ health through better food, UMCOR is encouraging training events to improve communities’ nutritional habits.
Among the changes being promoted is the cultivation of kitchen gardens (pictured above) where women in particular learn essentials of family nutrition, and themselves grow nutritious fruit and vegetables close to their homes.
“This is a wonderful way to empower women to improve their families’ health,” according to Mar.
