Nutrition and Food Security Programme
To improve the Food Security and Nutritional Status of children under five and patients on ART.
Specific Objectives
• To improve knowledge on home gardening and Nutrition among the beneficiaries, their households and communities.
• To improve the nutritional Status of malnourished children under five years of age and HIV/AIDS Patients on ART.
• To improve household access to adequate and nutritious food to meet the dietary needs of beneficiaries and their households.
Achievements of the Nutrition programme
Refresher Course in Nutrition for CHW
Training in nutrition and growth monitoring was conducted for 25 Community Health Workers (caregivers) directly responsible for looking after the malnourished children and HIV/AIDS patients in Chipembi. Topics handled included: HIV/AIDS and Nutrition, infant feeding, food preparation and growth monitoring and
promotion. The objective of the training was to rekindle, and enhance the knowledge of the care givers who would in turn be involved in training their household members as well as other willing community members. The training was conducted by the Consultant Nutritionist from the Lusaka District Health Management Team and the Agriculture Officer for Chipembi RHC with support from the CHAZ.
Seeds for food security were procured and distributed to the 24 communities to plant in preparation for the rain season. With good rains, it is hoped that the food security for the beneficiaries will increase.
The Agriculture Officer for Macha was sponsored for training in sustainable agriculture at Kasisi Agriculture Training Centre after which he trained the CHWs in order to infuse the knowledge he gained to others in the community. This was done in conjunction with the Agriculture Officer for Chipembi RHC trained 25 Trainers in Macha in Sustainable Agriculture.
The 2 Agriculture Officers were trained in community mobilisation in Monze at the Monze School of Agriculture and they are in turn supposed to cascade training to trainers in their constituencies. The officers found the training very helpful and felt that it would help them enhance their community mobilisation skills within their catchment areas.
Growth monitoring and promotion is one of the core activities under the project in order to determine how well the children are growing among the under fives, and also improvement of quality of life of TB patients and PLWHA. Weight gain to the children assessed was attributed to the provision of available cheap nutritious organically produced vegetables which formed part of their main diet.
In Macha, 849 beneficiaries registered and out of this number, 668 are malnourished children being monitored, 181 are HIV/AIDS patients. Out of the 668 malnourished children on growth monitoring, 388 of them gained weight. In Chipembi 503 Children are on growth monitoring, out of this number 300 have gained weight. PLWHA on ART are 113, 118 people have tested, but not on ART. For the T.B patients and PLWHA, weight monitoring was not done on the large scale due to inadequate weight boards. However, the situation should improve as the weight boards have since been procured and delivered to the CHIs.
The Agriculture Officers from both institutions including 2 representatives from the communities visited Lilayi organic garden, a garden run by a professional organic gardener who shared a lot with them on techniques of organic home gardening especially the use of organic pesticides, intercropping and companion cropping as a way of repelling pests in the garden. This visit was reported to have been fruitful. Results are yet to show as the visit was conducted in October when most beneficiaries are said to be busy preparing the field and so it is difficult to bring them together for training.
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