Funded projects that offers technical assistance and training and further analysis to USID's missions around the world. I was invited by the panelist to share their session. We have two presenters, we were supposed to have three but a woman from the Sudan, apparently hasn't shown up, perhaps she didn't make it to the conference, so we have two presenters. First let me just point out, the original title of this panel was The Role of Microbes in Food Security and in an effort to make a slightly less daunting title, the panel has decided to offered a changed title called Improving Women's Access to Food Production Technologies Strategies Achieving Nutritional Benefits. So perhaps you can take the choice of which title you prefer and we'll just go straight ahead and I want to introduce first Charlotte Johnson-Welch. Charlotte is currently the Deputy Director of the Economics Analysis Division at the International Center for Research on Women. She has a Masters of Science Degree in Public Health from the University of Massachusetts. Since beginning her work in international development since 1976, Charlotte has worked in every region of the world with a principle focus on Africa. Her technical expertise is applied in intervention research in health and nutrition with a special focus on women's roles in food security. And her research is centered on strengthening outcomes and impacts through increasing women's access to resources and decision making. Charlotte's going to start out and then she's going to hand over the floor to Kathleen Kerrs. Kathy is the Director of the Health and Social Analysis Division at the International Center for Research on Women. She has a PH.D. in International Nutrition from Cornell University with expertise in areas of maternal, adolescent and child nutrition and epidemiology. She's managed the nutrition of adolescent girls research program in which the nutritional status and health of adolescent girls and boys were investigated through 11 research projects in different developing countries. At the international center for research on women, Kathy works on issues of the girl child, adolescent reproductive health and women's roles in reducing micronutrient deficiencies. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Charlotte. We'll have both of the presentations and then we'll take questions at the end.

Hi. I appreciate your coming. Small audience so maybe we'll have some good discussions in the end. In our presentation today that Kathy and I will make, we'd like to share with you lessons learned from 5 intervention research studies that aim to improve nutritional status of household members through strategies developed by women. Not surprisingly, when women were asked what they needed to improve their families nutrition, they began from the perspective of being food producers and processors. Our presentation will begin with a brief introduction to our center, followed by a description of the research program including its objectives, design elements that contributed to its implementation and a brief overview of the five studies. At that point my colleague, Dr. Kerrs, will describe in detail two of the five studies. We've selected these as we feel they best articulate issues that are of particular relevance to this conference. Finally, we'll draw some lessons learned across the set of studies. The set of studies I will describe were designed and implemented by the International Center for Research on Women in partnership with our developing country colleagues. ICRW is a non profit research institution based in Washington, DC. We were founded 20 years ago following on the first international conference on women with a mission to promote economic and social justice with women's full participation. We work with developing country partners to conduct research that informs the development of policies and programs. ICRW under took these studies in recognition that intervention that involve women as participants and beneficiaries, often fall short of their objectives because they fail to consider the time investment required by women, and the socio-cultural and economic circumstances that constrain women's involvement. The funding for these studies was funded by the United States Agency for International Development, the Office of Health, Population, and Nutrition through a research program called Opportunities Micronutrient Interventions. The research was designed to explore ways to improve household members nutritional status, by strengthening women's abilities to meet the multiple roles as income earners, as care providers, and as food producers. Let's step back a minute and consider why women in this context. I'm sure it's not a surprise to any of us that women play critical roles in household nutrition. They produce food, they earn income to purchase foods and other goods and services, the preserve, store, process, and prepare food. They insure that their children have enough to eat and take care of their children ensuring general health and well being. Yet despite playing such critical essential roles to family nutrition, women often have less time and less access to the resources they need in order to meet these roles and responsibilities. These resources include time. Women have too much to do with too few options and technologies to perform their task efficiently and to maximize their effects. Women have less access to credit and other financial services. They are less able to obtain seeds, processing, production and other technologies. They have limited rights to land and water. In some countries, women are not permitted to leave or go far from their homes. They don't have access to vehicles, or may have to negotiate use of transportation that sometimes puts them at risk of unwanted sexual advances or violence. Women may not have the same access as men to education or training or to agriculture extension services for example, that might help them adopt more efficient cultivation practices use different seed varieties, or consider options for preservation and storage of food crops. Finally, women have fewer options in taking decisions and acting upon them They may not have the psychological, physical, or temporal space in which they can take decisions and they may not have the resource to act upon those decisions even if they are able to make and influence them. As a result, women are vastly more constrained in being able to meet their roles and responsibilities then our women. However, it given a full range of options and a latitude to make choices and act upon them, women can set their own priorities and take actions that can maximize their effects in meeting their roles and responsibilities. There were three elements built into the design of these studies to strengthen the length between research and action. First each of the research studies went beyond to collecting date, to using that data to inform the design and implementation of trial interventions to resolve problems that limit women's contribution to household nutrition. Second, in recognizing the contribution that program practitioners and researchers make to the design, implementation, and evaluation of research and to its ultimate use within the context of programs, each team was composed of both researchers and program practitioners. Finally, while quantitative research methods allow us to find the scope and range of the problems, they are often limited in being able to explore context and explain what may appear to be inexplicable. Thus, the research teams use both qualitative and quantitative methods to fully describe the situations, identify factors that contributed to its resolution, and document the effects of the intervention trial. I will now briefly summarize the five studies before turning the podium over to Kathy. The five studies were carried out in Ethiopia, Kenya, Peru, Tanzania, and Thailand. In Ethiopia, the goal was to improve vitamin A and iron status by building on women's in the dairy goat project. Agricultural extension agents worked with women groups and schools to improve food preparation and feeding practices and the production of vitamin A rich foods. In Kenya, a new variety of sweet potato rich with beta carotene was introduced to women farmers. The intervention included complimentary health and nutrition education to heighten awareness the contribution that vitamin A makes to children's health and to encourage consumption of food products prepared with the new variety. The study in Peru addressed issues related to improving iron intake of women clients in a set of 7 community kitchens in Lemoe. The researchers used a highly participatory approach to identify factors relating to improving the quality of service in terms of nutritional content of the meals and management practices and to stimulate demands of the innovations among clients. In Tanzania, the focus was on the adoption of a new home based solar dryer that met women's design and utilization needs. Nutrition and health education sessions and business training for marketing surplus production of solar dried vitamin A rich foods and food products, complimented this technology intervention. And finally in Thailand, the team built on experience from an earlier projects that resulted in increased production and consumption of vitamin A rich foods. In the new project, women leaders were trained in problem solving methods and worked with their communities to develop and implement plans of action to improve iodine, iron and vitamin A status. I would now like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Kerns. She worked at both the teams in Kenya and Tanzania and these are the two studies that we think are most illustrative of the issues that this conference is addressing. Kathy, you want to just talk from there?

While microbes in a sense facilitate certain property in technology. (Dr. Kerr is inaudible) I think the title came from Sudanese presentation and that person didn't show up and we were paired with them, so if we don't say that much just about microbes. If anybody else should feel free, this is more about food security and nutrition in agricultural linkages. No detail on microbes, but we encourage discussion on food security. We started out funding on micro-nutrient and feel like we came up with things that fit more food security. Some of those that Charlotte introduced, I'm going to be presenting in a little bit more detail on the Kenya/Tanzania. These were research studies, but interventions so having a program component with some evaluation with and the Kenya one has ended up with more an experimental design than Tanzania is a little bit different. And Kenya is farther along in interpreting those results so I'll spend a little bit more time on that one than the Tanzania one. Maybe I'll start with a comment that isn't up there and that just is cause I was recently out to Kenya and Charlotte just recently, you know, put some thoughts together about this agricultural nutrition linkage. We find often in our work, we both come more from a nutrition perspective but others at our institute come from agriculture and we're used to putting the two concepts together but more out in the field we find often that agriculture stops from when the food is harvested and the nutritionist starts, well I guess purchased and enters the household essentially. Whereas putting them together can give strength to both is the way we look at it. So we wonder sometimes why it's difficult, but we've watched a couple of these institutions we've worked with actually struggle to convince the agriculture's one case to say to add another objective to their work, to add another reason for doing their work and that is in the cases of Kenya /Tanzania vitamin A deficiency with crops or promoting crops. Not that you have to do a whole lot more, but it's just nice to be able to put another feather in your cap, if you will, by promoting and make some choices among some varieties which we'll see here in the Kenya study. And then the two go together with what we call food security too so that sometimes there's blockages about getting the nutrition listen to the agriculturist and the agriculturist listen to the nutritionist, but we ended up working with several teams for whom that connections was quite fluid and then lots of things come out of it that we found beneficial, so maybe we could come back to that in the discussion why it is often so difficult to get those two groups talking to each other and then maybe ways that we can convince them that it's in everybody's interest. So in Kenya, background to the study it's about orange sweet potatoes. Promoting them and a couple of other intervention activities to make sure the introduction of the orange sweet potato will take hold in western Kenya. The background facts are sub clinical vitamin A deficiencies widespread in Kenya, especially in certain spots, one of which is western Kenya. And of course has seasonal variability because the foods that have vitamin A are actually plant foods so then they come and go and when they come there's not so much vitamin A deficiency and then when they go, they develop some. In western Kenya, the white sweet potato is an important secondary staple. They used to have, the elders remember orange sweet potatoes, but I think in the last twenty years when white was better and rice, and flour, and some other things that they wanted white sweet potatoes and so there aren't so many local varieties of orange sweet potatoes around. But there were some at the station that this study was done by. The Kenya Agricultural research institute that's quite big in Kenya the potato center is a component of it together with the international potato center, one of the system affiliates. And so they have those varieties around and they had done some pre study taste tests indicate that the beta carotene enriched and the white sweet potatoes were light and for them in Africa and I think in other places as well, they wouldn't have them as watery as our orange sweet potatoes here in the States and maybe in other places are like, starchier foods if they're going to consider the state believe in a secondary staple. And then to bring in the women's angle, the food crop sweet potato is planted and harvested by women because it's a rude crop it's obviously had some advantages in drought which occurred during this study so it's like starvation crop, it'll be there when the mays, which is their favorite, might not thrive so much. So promoting orange sweet potato production and consumption is a way to promote women's ability to reduce vitamin A deficiency in their families which was what Charlotte had said was our theme from the nutrition point of view if nutritionist folks allow them the medical aspects of some of these deficiencies we wanted to focus on what's women's role in reducing vitamin A deficiency among other and promoting health within their families. So then overall the goal of this study was to determine whether beta carotene rich sweet potatoes varieties can provide a year round sustainable source of vitamin A in an area where significant levels of the deficiency, especially in children under five. So reading from the bottom up in this, just what the experimental design was, the orange sweet potato vines and the agricultural assistance was given to twenty women's groups. The women's groups were just chosen as a way to get started in the community. Vines are spread, in this area, vines are not usually soiled, they're usually spread from farmer to farmer or in this case, women's groups to women's groups, it's not the only way to introduce new vines, it's just that this is what the team chose as a way to get started. And then the experimental part is that 10 of the groups we called intervention groups got promotion of the orange sweet potatoes, not just everybody got the vines half of the group got extra promotion in the form of nutrition education. So food processing lessons in what I'll call community support activities which I'll get to. And then what I'm calling the control women's groups got no additional promotion. And just a few other elements of the design is that the twenty women's groups were chosen on their stability. When a new project comes in a women's group conform like that so before they chose the groups they were looking for some cohesive, some cohesiveness, some history, and in the case of the outcome, because it's the young children who are most vulnerable to vitamin A deficiency, then women's group were also chosen on the proportion of women who had children younger than five. Within these twenty groups I showed you on the previous overhead, ten were in one district call in D110 and another one that's significant because the first one in Dewa had much more vitamin A deficiency, Yrango had less than they expected, but was of interest because of market women and we wanted to see what happened with the food processing and how much sold and how far, how quickly it would be spread in the markets. So then half these groups were randomly allocated to intervention and control and we measured pre and post this interventional, when I say the intervention, I mean these extra activities to promote the orange sweet potato, and so the pre and post measurements were one year apart. It's important to, especially in seasonally, to measure at the same time of the year. In this case, actually they started their first measurement was in April and their second measurement was in July the following year which was on purpose, they didn't get delayed. The July was more like the April before it because there had been some drought. This year they have floods, last year they had drought. And an important element of the intervention was you know, you can give a nutrition education session, you can do some lessons on food processing, but people have questions in their minds and it's good to follow up with them. And they were followed up monthly during the year either at the women's groups or individual women. And they came up with things like you know what you said at the nutrition education session made sense, but I went home and my mother or my mother in law said that doesn't fit with the way we believe in it and then she has a conflict and then you know, she may or may not implement but if somebody comes back, then they can talk through some of those issues and make sense and can get over the conflict between the two sets of information that the woman's getting. And then the outcome in this case is a nutrition outcome, it's called a Helen Keller international score and it's number of times a week a young child eats a vitamin A rich food including an orange sweet potatoes but not limited to it and it's measured among children that are less than five so I'll be talking HKI score but it has to do with frequency of eating a vitamin A rich food. So to just show you cue results where base line HKI scores were low initially they improved dramatically after the intervention. Let me show you this in terms of graphs, you see if you're comparing the first two sets of bars with the second, you see that the HKI scores both before and after the intervention were quite low. With these scores the way they've been worked out is that think of 6, an HKI score of 6, as cut off. Below which you're at serious risk of vitamin A, poor vitamin A status, and above 6 you're probably okay. So there's a certain frequency of foods that some earlier people had done some work on to show that changes into status so you might get some of the bad side effects of vitamin A deficiency which at a very extreme level can lead to blindness or spots on the eyes, or night blindness and at earlier stages make you less resistant to illness. And this is very real to the people out in Kenya, not the blindness or even the night blindness, but they see their kids, unfortunately, the measles immunizations haven't been forth coming from administrative health and I think with help with UNICEF recently and they see their kids dying more readily from measles that they would, with vitamin A doesn't keep you from getting something like measles and other diseases, but without a full immune system a child won't be able to fight it off as easily and that was the one that resonated with them and they were most likely to have as a consequence of low vitamin A status. So thinking we're shooting for all of these communities in Dewa, this is an average of the twenty, the ten, I guess five each in the set of various women's groups, an average of that think of trying for in Dewa was quite low, I think about four and we were looking for them to get over 6 at the end. We didn't expect the ones in Rondo, the second two set of bars to be so high at the beginning. They were quite a bit over 6 and then for the change I think it's clear in the next overhead comparing the two bars that were right next to each other, this is an overhead of the changes scores from one year to, from one point to one year later. And so in Dewa, the interventions with the promotion of the orange sweet potato increased really dramatically. Both control areas did not actually decreased in frequency, we're not quite sure, usually you have a control group to be able to say that they didn't change relative to the other group in this case they decrease quite a bit in their frequency of their intake of vitamin A rich foods. And then the third bar the intervention, Rondo I think, that's almost no change at all. It looks like a little bit of decrease but that's all almost no change at all which says to me that they were high enough anyway, they didn't, there wasn't, they weren't going to increase that much more in vitamin A rich foods. But so what needed to happen the most, actually happened and that is in the areas where there was vitamin A deficiency and the promotion of the orange sweet potatoes there was a dramatic increase in the consumption which pushed them over this level of 6 which probably took them out of the danger, the young kids out the danger areas in terms of vitamin A status. And then often these HKI scores are a composite of foods rich in vitamin A we often look to which particular foods within that score increased and it was a little bit different in the two communities. Now these bars are in comparison not before and after but of the intervention and the control at the final measurement and the orange sweet potatoes, the orange sweet potatoes were eaten a lot more in the intervention groups where that had this promotion, dark green leafy vegetables also went up, mango went up quite a bit, anything that's orange or dark green that is plant is likely to be rich in vitamin A and mangos a good source. And then animal products have, a number of animal products have a performed vitamin A so egg yolk, and that was a part of the message of the nutrition education too, so the egg yolk consumption was higher in the intervention and the control and then also butter was also higher in the intervention and control. In Rondo the orange sweet potato and the eggplant, the egg yolk were the same and they also increased in liver which is a very good source, that's where vitamin A is stored, this is cow's liver but, in many animals it's stored in, the vitamin A is stored in the liver so that's a very good source. And then the final one is not really a vitamin A source it's just that fat helps the absorption of vitamin A and that message also came across in the nutrition education, so they used more, a little bit more oil, quite a bit more oil than on foods for the young children than they had before the nutrition education. And just some correlated results, skip the first one. The first one just says just confirmed with the initial survey that there was a lot of vitamin A deficiency and low scores of these foods. And then nutrition knowledge increase a lot. The beta carotene content of the orange sweet potatoes was quite high, like carrots and they did an analysis. There were quite a few varieties they introduced to the people of these unfound trials among the women's groups and then they tested the beta carotene content. And so some were more on the yellow side and some getting deeper in orange and the beta carotene content increased with the deepness of the orange color. And the taste and texture were preferred over the white. It was hard to do a really blind test but they did do unlabeled among the varieties and the adults like the high dry matter contents, the more starchy, but they like to have the more watery ones for the weaning foods for the children. The potatoes, as you might guess, were sweeter and then more appealing in color so they were really very well accepted. And for amongst the older people who remembered having had them before, were happy to have them back. And the yields were higher, because the vitamin A that's in the potato, it's like being growth promoting in humans when they eat it, it also promotes the yields of potatoes itself. So the agriculture yields, given the same inputs, were higher for the orange sweet potatoes than the whites. And a few, just a few other comments is that, what do people use these for I've showed it mostly more in terms of consumption, but these Rondo market women and some of these lessons on food processing it was more sort of coming up with recipes with these women's groups and there's a couple of starchy, donut or pate like things that are sold from the market and when they use orange sweet potato, it substituted for some of the flour and some of the sugar, so they sold very quickly because they were sweeter and it was a different taste and a new product. And so the point of view from the women selling them, even if they sold them at the same price, they would make more of a profit because they could substitute orange sweet potato for a more expensive item. So that was really nice to hear. I've talked with it as a woman's crop, but one man decided to devote a whole part of his plot to it and it all sold all at once and he was happy to pay for his children's school fees. So when it becomes a cash crop, even if it's the same crop, it's usually a man that's going to make it into cash crop and the woman will keep it as a food crop. So then they just concluded that orange sweet potatoes are a good addition to the diet in western Kenya to reduce the vitamin A deficiency because they are available all year round, the mangoes aren't, the dark green leafy vegetables, unless you dry them, aren't. They were very well accepted and actually preferred to what they had locally. They were drought resistant, I think the big effect that we got in terms of consumption, may actually be slightly exaggerated, because there was drought that year so then you'd have to depend a little bit more than you might had otherwise on the drought resistant crop than their primary staple, which is Mays, which didn't do very well in the drought. They had higher yields and it's easy to distribute these vines vitally. So the people would spread them. The Rondo women were spiked that it wasn't traditional to do so, while the clever market women were selling them because they were in such high demand. But I think after a little while, they wouldn't be able to do that because it was traditional to just, you know, clip off a vine and give it to your neighbor. And so also the agricultural research stations of Carre, the agricultural research institute were doing math distributions whenever they went out. The second one we don't need to pay much attention to and then just to come back to the issue of promoting the consumption of the vitamin A rich foods, including the orange sweet potato, was essential just passing the vines around and doing a cursory nutrition education wasn't quite enough as we saw in the control areas cause they got the vines. But to make the agricultural nutrition link, it was essential to having such extra promotion activities. And then you get the increase of the animal products in addition to the orange sweet potatoes. I just wanted to say something about the sustainability, because I think the agricultural extension workers of the ministry of the agriculture, were the field workers in this case. You know the proposal that we saw and supported mostly we were working with the people in Nairobi, the Kenya agriculture research institute. But then they work very closely with the ministry of agriculture, agricultural extension folks out in western Kenya. Some of those, some of the home economists are part of that extension team, but I think that even if, even if there weren't home economist on the team, that the ones giving advice on the crops could send a bit of a message about the vitamin A and with the vines and do a bit of nutrition education to fall in the category of promotions, so I think that this is highly sustainable. The people who did these monthly visits and the study were field workers hired by the study but that's just see if it works, I think it is quite sustainable by the agriculture extension workers.

Now on the Tanzania study, this was on solar dryers. This is done sort of out in north central Tanzania and it's quite erred. Only has one rainy season with a variety of foods that is much less than the study we were just talking about in Kenya, and they don't have so many sources of vitamin A. The dark green leafy vegetables are their main source, but not available much, say year round. So the front line sort of laying blankets out, putting their leaves out in the sun is been traditionally by women. So, again we weren't going to introduce something completely new, but just sort of an improvement on what they traditionally had done, solar dryers. This project was shown by the Tanzania food and nutrition center. There are not a lot of solar dryers around, I think the ones they introduced in these projects were developed particularly for Tanzania by the people at the Tanzania food and nutrition center. They had a lot bigger variety of solar dryers that they offered apart of this study within communities. They had done this before with wooden dryers and the people in Cinke they had liked, they had stuck with same study area over these several years. And the people had liked those solar dryers, but there were sort of some glitches in that study that they wanted to come back and address in this one. One of them was, the earlier study introduced the solar dryers in terms of promote the drying of mangoes. Now mangoes aren't indigenous to Cinke but what they were suggesting was that people was to go off to another district, buy mangoes, come back, dry them, and then sell the dried products. But particularly in this area of Cinke, that they just aren't sort of market oriented enough, so once the study left, which was promoting these drying of these mangoes, so did the drying of the mangoes. So in this study, they just wanted to stick with what they normally dry anyway and promote the dryers in that respect. So the goal was to determine whether dried dark green leafy vegetables can provide as another one of the year round sustainable source of vitamin A in an area that's vitamin A deficient. And this study design was a little bit different and not so much someone would pick and choose whether they would end up in the study essentially. We chose intervention communities and control communities, but then with the intervention communities people chose whether they were going to adopt these solar dryers or not. So the main comparison I'll be talking about is the second here, that amongst people in the intervention communities to whom the dryers were offered they were households who chose to adopt it and households that chose not to adopt it. There's another comparison that's perhaps possible because it was a study that went over two years, and that's one that had adopted for two years versus one year. But I think the sample size was too small among those who adopted right away, I mean they just took a while to adopt. So my main comparison that I'll be talking about is the adopter households versus the non adopter households. When I say they were offered the dryers, it was another thing they didn't want to repeat from the earlier study. They were, they offered the expertise of the artisans who had been trained to build these and they offered technical assistance on the building, but they didn't give these, they didn't get these dryers for free. They felt that had been a flaw the previous one. So people chose, and when they were ready, had the money, then they built their solar dryers and that's why I think there was the adopter households versus the non adopter households is really comparison of people who adopted for one year. Because it just took a while for people to build these. Okay, next one.

So they measured how much they dried when they had these that consumption scores like we did in the Kenyas studies. There was also an objective, I guess in both of these studies, in all of these studies that Charlotte outlined, we were sort of curious if it was the food where the people would eat more of it or sell more. Where nutritionist are often really keen that only the first happen, but looking at it more holistically, we were just interested because if you just sell, then you have the money then you can buy something else, and it's more an economic decision on her part, how she can make best use of the product she has to sell or consume. So there was some business training, some sort of how to market and how to set your prices and go to the market given to the women in this Tanzania study. But I think that really has to be looked as a long term goal because these weren't market women and they didn't pick up real quickly within the two year time frame of the study. So the results were essentially that the adopters dried a lot more, a certain greens than the non adopters. If you take all the greens together there wasn't a big difference. The adopters where everyone was drying, the adopters were drying with this improved solar dryers and the non adopters were drying by laying it out in the sun. The adopters, probably because of the nutrition education that went along with the introduction of the solar dryers, the adopters had significantly higher vitamin A intake. This is even a bigger difference than in the Kenya study and in an area where there are fewer vitamin A sources. So this is quite impressive. Now of course because the adopters were a little bit better off, so they might have more means to buy other vitamin A rich foods and they might have just been a group like all of the first adopters, they were probably a little bit quicker to take up new ideas and have a few more resources in which that would allow them to take up new ideas like this. So there may be something about these people that also made the score go up a lot to this great extent. And only a small degree of the adopters sold and bartered a bit more of their greens, but this wasn't a huge difference. Like the difference between 12% of their yield and 16% of their yield. I should say that these greens that they were drying can either come from their fields or there were some wild ones. And I guess the most important thing from the nutrition point of view and what the solar dryers are meant to do, is to preserve more of the beta carotene. So if you put it inside a box and you have, there are many advantages from a nutrition point of view, that the main one is more of the beta carotene is retained. So every leaf they were eating later, putting into stews as the year went on, then they were getting a lot more beta carotene. I didn't write conclusions up, but some of the things that, let me just say, that some of the things that they liked about it, is that the team found overall is that the solar dryers-Side one finished.

Side two-Tape #341.

People who were adopted initially would see how it went with the first. It's not prohibitively expensive, but it's enough that you'd save up a bit and then decide to make one. And the artisans found that they were in high demand for learning how to build these. Quite simply, solar drying, the technologies an appropriate methods for ensuring year round availability for fruits and vegetables, and in this case, just the green leafy vegetables. And the women like the technologies because you put the greens sort of inside this box and it had sort of netting on top, so the air would flow, so that inside the netting was like a black cloth so it's a direct sunshine that makes the beta carotene not be retained so if you put black cloth, let the air circulate but not let the direct sun rays on, that's what retains some of the beta carotene. But in addition to that, it being inside a box then the product in the end was more hygienic. It didn't have, you know, they didn't have to wash it off carefully because it wasn't laying out in the open. They lost less of it to, you know, animals and wind, and it dried quicker, so it reduced women's work load. So overall, they were really happy with it. It has to be portable, I mean some can be built where you can put a lot of greens and dry a lot, but they need to be able to put it out during the day and bring it indoors at night, so they didn't have to worry about it being stolen. So I think that the weight of this solar dryer that the team came up with was also critical. And then drying time was reduced, so you know, didn't take much time and reduced their work load. Okay I think that's, Charlotte you wanted to come back to some general results, right?

Even though we didn't describe the others, there were five studies that were done, Kathy just gave you more detail on two. But what I want to do is draw conclusions across the set of five, so you're just going to have to trust me that the other three in fact, contribute to the conclusions I'm drawing. The first, and I must say that these are not earth shattering, these are not something that if you use good common sense you couldn't come up with, which speaks to us in general, it's just, it's a process of using good development techniques which leads us to these conclusions. So the first result is using an approach that takes explicit account of women's multiple roles can contribute directly to improving family nutrition. All five studies, the two that Kathy talked about, Peru, Thailand, and Ethiopia as well, used highly participatory approaches to engage women and some men, in the problem identification and solution development process. Because of this process, the methodologies led to solutions that were acceptable to those most directly impacted by them, appropriate given local concerns, resources, needs and constraints and were effective in addressing the issues identified by the participants. As a result, local ownership is created, there by contributing to solutions that are more sustainable than if they had been developed by outsiders. Next one. Well, I don't know, the rest of them are missing.

The second conclusion is based on, the food based interventions can improve nutritional status within a short period of time. It's often thought that it would take a long time to see the benefits on human nutrition of using food based interventions. This may be a result of the fact that nutrition is effective by many things, including food consumption. But we're hypothesizing it also has to do with the way people think. That sometimes, people think in a linear fashion and you have to do this, and then you do this, and you do this and that there's equal time on each of these steps. Whereas these five studies seem to indicate that if you spend sufficient time up front in the planning and the engaging in the people in the process, that in fact, the time is reduced in terms of measuring the real results. And that, as a result of this, we feel that people who would be more inclined to say it's better to get people a supplement, a pill or something, then you're going to see real changes over time. In fact, you can see changes through food if you go through the right process. And that these interventions tend to be more sustainable because they're not dependent on outside producers in terms of the vitamin supplements. The third conclusion I wanted to draw from this that it's important to think design and implement in a holistic manner rather than vertically. In order to improve nutritional status, women must have knowledge and awareness of the problem and accept the need to take action. They need income to purchase goods and services, inputs to enhance food production, time, skills, and knowledge to care for their children. And none of these independent of each other is sufficient to achieve long term sustainable change. Thus combining, integrating, pulling in resources from multiple sectors is more likely to resolve problems that are multi faceted. And the last conclusion that I wanted to draw was it is important to consider sociocultural economic and political environment. Critical as it is to engage community members in solution development, due consideration also must be given to factors that lie outside as single individuals or household abilities to take action. It's critical to acknowledge the factors that constrain individual decision making are different for man and for women. Thus program planners and policy makers must take into account all factors that contribute to good health and nutrition. Including those that are within an individuals ability to change and those that are larger and require more systemic action. And through this type of factor analysis, we can in fact, achieve the objectives we've all set out to achieve. So now, if you have questions or you want to hear more about any of this in detail, we'll open it up for discussion. We do have, I mentioned earlier, this bulletin that describes the program, the five studies that are part of it. Because this is written nearly a year ago, April 97, we were just in the middle of the intervention trial so it describes what the trials were, but we have no results in this. But if you're interested just in the description of the studies, this is available for you.

Okay just a quick comment before we open it up, I'm sure you're probably all familiar by now that we're using the microphone because this session is being directly recorded onto a tape. So for those of you with questions, I think it's probably best if you could come on up and speak into the microphone to ensure that your questions are properly recorded. So any questions?

Hi I'm Danielle Worth from Iowa and I confess my ignorance about the bio diversity of the areas where you were working and I was wondering is this sweet potato a native plant in that area? Yeah, the orange and yellow had been around probably 20, 30 years ago and they had sort of thrown those vines away in favor of the white ones, but it was all. Actually I should say that they germ plasm they brought back in for some of the varieties that they reintroduced were from other countries. Peru where potatoes are big and Japan, but the notion, they had been there at one time. Any food security comments?

I'm not the only one a little perplexed. I'm a farmer, and I thought when I came to this session I was going to get some intense interest going in microbes. Could you explain to me, if I thought I was going to hear about microbes, what I would've heard? The way the conference was organized, we all submitted abstracts and then they pull together panels and I think the problem occurred as when they were reading the abstracts, the one that came in from Sudan, was talking about microbes in the sense of fermentation, of preparing weaning foods. So whoever was reading the abstracts saw microbes and created the title. And then they looked at ours that was Mirco-nutrients and whomever, put the two together. So I think it was a misnomer at the point where they were collecting the abstracts, so I apologize. But we tried to get this changed and we couldn't. Let me just add to that for those of you who are interested, I have a two page abstract here of the Sudanese woman's paper, which is on microbes and fermentation, so after when we're all done, I'm happy to let you take a look at this. Other questions?

I'd like to know as a farmer, why you were interested in microbes, I mean, what is your interest in this? Okay maybe before we go to that, do we have other questions about the presentation?

I was just going to ask about the year round productivity that was coming from the beta carotene one done from the white potato. I just wondered they were productive year round (rest of question inaudible). Because compared to like green leafy vegetables where you pick it at one point in the year you could go and dig up the orange sweet potatoes any time you wanted. So it was just waiting for you in the ground there, it's not, I mean you plant it in a seasonal pattern, but you can pretty much dig it up all through the year so it was self stored essentially. And that's why it was a year round supply as opposed to mangoes that come off the trees at certain point and some other foods that were there vitamin A sources.

With the nutrition education, as I understood this as you had, I thought that was a known fact that nutrition education has an impact. So really what you were looking at is with the control group just how much nutrition education is needed to have an impact. Was that the idea? Okay. And I'm only doing this because we're tape recording. I think the issue is in ag. products, like Kathy was saying, the agricultural institutes focus on production and yield issues. And what we're saying in order to take that to the next step to show nutrition benefits, you can't just stop at the production and yield. You have to do something additional. And that additional is inform people that in terms of nutritional benefits why would I give this to my kid as opposed to that. So it was more a demonstration that in order to make the link between ag production and nutritional benefits, it's not just necessarily one shot deal, you have to give additional inputs. And input is other nutritional education, you're right, nutritional education works if it's done in certain ways and certain messages, yadda, dadda, duh. But it's more that element that they were testing, I think. Do you have any more questions relative to that?

Other questions on the presentation? Okay it can go in any direction you want now.

My questions to you I looked at your badge. Women, food and ag network of Iowa, how do you see this project in one country relating to the work you're doing in Iowa. That's a great question, I don't know if I have an answer because I'm not a farmer. I am with this particular network because I have an interest in the environment. In Iowa, the environmental issue is agriculture, so that's why I am with this network and I'm with the local family farmers who are growing things organically and sustainable and I'm interested in bio regional wisdom that is what will the landscape grow in terms of its rainfall, its soil nutrients, and I'm really intrigued with your study because it sounds like you went back to bio-regional wisdom, and I apologize for being late, but I heard the word rice, but I don't know that much about Africa ecology or agriculture, but I don't believe rice is a native crop to Africa.

Some variety of rice is.

Okay but not where you were doing the study so I'm intrigued and delighted that you got back to native vegetation which probably has a better chance of surviving and also we're in, did you look at the stories that rise from the land and the people because a lot of times, it seems they've got stories about what was appropriate to eat and how to prepare it and I think there's a lot of indigenous knowledge that often gets ignored in ag development situations. But it sounds to me like you included indigenous knowledge in your nutrition study.

I mean that's apart of study like this where, I'm sure they heard lots of stories that's not what the team we were working with documented, we could get them to document that I'm sure, but when I was with them, we'd go around and people, especially the older people would say we used to have those now why do we not, so they were, you know it was coming back for a different reason, you know, called vitamin A but, you know people did remember and I mentioned the rice when you did come is as sort of, it was another like preferring white rice to brown rice and a switch that happened a while ago, I think that's why people had switched to white sweet potatoes and thrown the other vines away. I was just making an analogy to the white is better craze that went on a while ago and I think they're happy to have the other ones back.

I'm hogging it so now generalize the question, as a farmer and in resident food security, one of my concerns is that so few people actually have touch with the land and growing food or foods. I had thought maybe that from the Iowa lady that I would here a little bit more about community gardens and the use of land resources within cities from municipal areas to allow people to produce some of their own foods. And I think I see a direct spin from what you were doing in your studies back to the cities that we have here where people still think that milk comes from cardboard carton, not glass anymore. And I was in touch with some ideas that was on community gardening and the use of that for nutritional programs. I think I was trying to understand your question, now I have a better idea of how to respond. In Iowa, 95% of the food that people eat is imported. If there was a transportation strike, Iowa would starve. So there is a movement, there is a strong contingency of CSA's in Iowa that are growing by leaps and bounds. There's one project called Field to Family which has been funded directly by the USDA one of their cost share programs that is trying to link urban residents many times these people are on public assistance, single mothers are trying to integrate some really basic nutrition standards into their diet, so they're linking rural growers with urban consumers and apparently it's a great mix and that's happening in terms of looking at food stamp programs, involving the religious communities, the churches as distribution sites and also promoters of the system. So it's growing, but it catches on more in the urban areas rather than rural areas.

Perhaps you could address Mary's question to you in your interest in microbes and to farming.

Oh, thank you, we did bypass that one didn't we. Probably because my question is still a question. As a producer, a person in agriculture, I am now in a study group trying to determine what to do about impaired waters in the United States of America. First of all, I thought maybe we'd get into some real scientific detail on what's validity test, what to do with the information you get, and then turn around and look at some feasibility's, and I can see it as a world community issue. Microbes, some good, some bad and I thought maybe we'd go into some of that. I was really ready for a real technical scientific discussion, you know, I ‘d prepared myself for it and here I was on a very humanitarian mission, not saying that they can be separated, but there are some differences and that's where my head was at on microbes. I came being totally ignorant. But it was one subject that I knew nothing about and I thought, well why not go to something that's a bit of a challenge and so that's why I ended up here.

Are there any other comments or questions?

I'm interested in this idea of broadening this scope of agriculture to include the link with nutrition because when I was in Honduras, women were excluded because of two definitions. One was farming and one was fishing. And the reason was the farming there started with planting the seed, it didn't have anything to do with the selection of the seed or preservation of the seed and it ended with harvest. And in this part of Honduras, women didn't do, they did some, they supported their husbands in the planting of the Mays, and they did some weeding and some other things, but what they did after the harvest was critical. They preserved, they ground the Mays into flour, they preserved it in other ways they made the tortillas which was the substance, the stable food of the area and they also marketed. And so my point is by your definition of link broadening agriculture to include nutrition, it has also occurred to me that broadening these definitions and fishing is the same way.

We give you back the microphone now. And I guess we'll just go ahead and close the session then as long as everyone has had all there questions and comments expressed. Great. Thanks for coming.