Food Security for 3,000 Women & Children in Rwanda

May 25th, 2pm, Kicukiro District in Kigali, women are chatting and cooking, kids are playing…it’s a busy day around Gatenga Health Center’s kitchen area! Twice a month, in fact, we offer free nutrition services to malnourished children and their mothers at this community health center, which include culinary demonstrations and nutrition education workshops. 

Why cooking workshops and nutrition education, you wonder? We embarked on this project with the objective of improving the nutrition and food security of 3,000 children and their mothers in Kigali; and so, we provided seeds, tools, set up micro-gardens and trained youth in micro-agriculture. The vegetables have grown abundantly in the gardens – and they look great! They are ready to be harvested and provide nutritious meals for the kids we serve. So now what? We found out that many of the mothers in our program did not know what constitutes a well-balanced meal, nor were they aware that what you eat affects how you learn and function in your daily life – in particular, that it greatly affects their children’s physical and cognitive development. Providing hands-on cooking workshops turned out to be a simple way to contribute to the fight against malnutrition – by changing nutrition habits, mothers and their children can learn how to eat healthy and stay healthy!

And so, during our culinary demonstrations and hand-on cooking workshops, our nutritionists teach mothers of vulnerable children how to prepare well-balanced meals for the whole family using the produce from the micro-gardens we set up beforehand, also following the nutrition and hygiene practices they learned. But these meals have a secret ingredient, a very green one…

Each meal prepared includes Spirulina as a food supplement, more precisely, Spirulina grown directly onsite, in the 54 square meter greenhouse we built at Gatenga Health Center. Spirulina is a blue-green microalga (aka a seaweed) considered a “super food” by nutritionists because of its high nutritional value: it is 60-70% protein-rich and contains all essential vitamins and minerals needed to grow strong and healthy. And so, we are using it to help fight child malnutrition in Kigali. As a result of our Spirulina micro-farming training, a monthly average of 1,800 liters of this “super food” is now being grown at the Center. This is enough to service between 328 and 494 malnourished kids weekly. This micro-farm is such a success that we are able to both provide the necessary quantity of Spirulina for the Center’s nutrition activities and supply it to neighboring sites, such as schools, which will use it as a food supplement in the students’ lunches.

Thanks to your contribution, we’ve become the first ones ever in Rwanda to set up a community Spirulina farm and hold culinary demonstrations in which Spirulina is administered to malnourished mothers and children. This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without the micro-farm, without the seeds, without the training and the necessary equipment and tools, which you allowed us to provide to the Gatenga Health Center.

The Gatenga Health Center has now been identified by the City of Kigali as a nutrition training venue where to hold further demonstrations, cooking workshops and micro-agricultural trainings, including Spirulina micro-farming, thus spreading the use of this “super food” to fight malnutrition throughout the City of Kigali and beyond.

Back in the Center’s kitchen, the food is almost ready…and it is starting to smell very good. Let’s add some Spirulina and bon appetit!

Links:

• YaLa Africa's Website