Stop Malnutrition and Infant Mortality in Cameroon

The stop malnutrition project in the last 3 months continued its campaign to strengthen healthy living in the life of the community members who started the training for the market driven agricultural system as stated in the last report. This time around, the team concentrated their efforts on the second group of women who decided to focus on the cultivation of Maize and plantain while monitoring and supporting the first set of women who had started their filed session on the cultivation of yams and pepper. This first group of women were able to harvest their seedlings which did so well, and went ahead to plant these seedlings with assistant from expert from the stop malnutrition team.

The second group of women in this phase received lectures on how to use improved seeds in the cultivation and multiplication of their food crops. The women for maize cultivation where given improved (hybrid) corn seeds to plant. This improved corn seeds where gotten from our partners from the regional delegation of agriculture.  The women expressed their happiness as to the seeds and went ahead to cultivate these seeds with help from experts from the team.

The other set of women who were interested in the cultivation of plantains were been thought on how to set a community plantain propagator which will enable them in the months ahead to commence with the planting of the plantain tubes.  This plantain propagation will serve the women in this community for years.  Lectures were also given on hoe to carter for this propagator and a management team was set up to ensure the propagator is well managed.

In the last 3 month, the team has thought of different ways to push forward with healthy living in the different communities. This is due to the present political situation in the country which has made it difficult to access the community and for direct support to be giving to the communities. In a bite to continue the training and workshop, the stop malnutrition team has been involved in setting up strategies to assist women to pick up and put in place activities to set up the agricultural driven market system. Base on the different crop types selected by the 50 women from the last report, the team has held 2 other training sessions with the women to educate them on improve and better method of cultivating the different crop types they selected.  In the first workshop, the women were grouped into six groups based on the different crop types they were interested in. That is pepper crop (7), yam crop (10), cassava crop (7), tomatoes crop (5), maize crop (16) and plantain (5). Lecturers and manual to aid the women in the production of the different crops were given in the first class. The team  explained in detail what it entail to cultivate this different food crops for sales and what we will be needing from the women to ease cultivation.

The next class was a filed session with the different women, given the lack of funds, we decided to work with 2 groups for the first three months to set up their farms. The field session started with the women interested in Yams cultivation and these for pepper cultivations. Our reason where due to the fact that the organization had already set up farms for the cultivation of this crops as well as available seeds to assist the women and also the technical know-how. Every woman was given seedlings to enable them set a nursery so as to multiple the seeds while preparing for the planting season.

The women expressed their joy and willingness to the program. Mama Joffi one of the participant interested in pepper farming said. “I am so happy this seeds were given to us and we were also thought how to nest them. I know I will not disappoint the trainers as I will follow all the instructions to ensure I have the best farm”.