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Feeding hungry minds
Patricia Lucas
May 19, 2006

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=272616&area=/insight/monitor/

In the war against hunger in Southern Africa, food for thought can be as powerful as food for the stomach. While food aid is an obvious short-term solution to chronic hunger, information can steer hungry people towards long-term development strategies, such as improving hygiene, preventing disease, empowering women and children, starting a new business, getting an education and diversifying diet and farming with a variety of sturdier food crops.

Food insecurity in the region is not just a matter of rainfall or drought. It is a combination of chronic poverty, some of the world’s highest national HIV/Aids prevalence rates and the dwindling capacity of governments to meet the needs of sick and malnourished people, orphans and other vulnerable children. The United Nations calls these combined factors the Triple Threat. If these root issues behind food insecurity are not addressed, chronic hunger will not just go away.

So, along with humanitarian relief, aid agencies are now delivering information that people can use to develop themselves and their communities. Educational advocacy, for instance, features in many projects of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

Food distribution points provide the ideal platform for education advocacy: they can draw a few thousand people together for most of a day. As they wait for their food rations, these people are not only a captive audience, but an eager one.

Tiya Nkhota, a project co-ordinator with Goal, the Irish relief organisation that helps to distribute WFP food aid in southern Malawi, said most of the 3 400 people she saw at the monthly distribution site in Mbenje, about 110km from Blantryre, were orphans and caregivers of people suffering from chronic illness.

Although HIV/Aids is an obvious topic for education advocacy, Nkhota and her colleagues also discuss other issues, such as sexual exploitation, sanitation, borehole maintenance to reduce cholera infection and the rights of children - especially orphans.

The proof of education advocacy is in the level of change that is taking place in families and communities. Ajasi Mphwala, the chief of Njoho, a village about 200km northwest of Blantyre, Malawi, said he has adopted the education advocacy strategy for his community: every month he calls a village meeting and, with the help of NGOs, he sees that his people learn how to care for their growing population of young orphans. One result is that a group of adults has set up a day-care centre for 92 children. The initiative is such a success that four more communities are planning to open day-care centres.

HIV/Aids remains a major concern across the region. After Goal and health officials joined forces in an HIV public awareness campaign, the Nsanje District Hospital near Mbenje reported a 300% increase in the number of patients coming for voluntary counselling and testing.

Anepetulo, a headman, said Nkhota and her team have changed attitudes in his community: "We don’t discriminate in our village between HIV-positive and HIV-negative. We all learn and work together."

Other initiatives in Malawi focus on a range of education-advocacy topics. They train home-based care volunteers on healthy cooking for the chronically ill, provide information on fighting gender-based violence, integrate nutrition information into hospitals’ anti-retroviral therapy programmes, teach the importance of education for children, demonstrate new farming methods and crop diversity principles to increase food production, and train mothers to cook and preserve indigenous vegetables. They are then asked to pass on what they have learned to their communities.

A recent WFP report, Potential for Educational Advocacy Activities in Nutrition, HIV/Aids Awareness, Education, summarises a 13-month study on the effectiveness of combining education advocacy initiatives with food aid in southern Africa.

The report concludes that combining educational advocacy with food aid gives people opportunities to improve their lives. "With the right combination of information and education, WFP beneficiaries can be empowered to become agents of social change rather than passive recipients of aid," it says.

*Patricia Lucas is the Southern Africa public information officer for the World Food Programme

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