Promoting resilience in African rural households: food systems at a crossroads - RELAX

This project RELAX aims to gain a clearer understanding of what determines the food diversity of farming households, throughout the year, by looking at farm production, natural resources, and at selling and provision practices on rural markets. The project pays particular attention to seasonality, along with roles and relations between individuals (notably women and men) within households

Action workshop (September 2017): the participants were invited to divide foods available on the market into different categories and then explain how they arrived at their decision. © A. Bichard

Issues

In the cotton-cereal producing regions of West Africa, the improvements in cereal production achieved in recent decades cannot be denied. Yet, this progress is not matched by satisfactory food security and nutrition results. While calorie intakes have improved overall, cereal shortages in the lean period persist for many households, and chronic malnutrition remains pervasive, notably due to micronutrient deficiencies linked to insufficiently diversified diets. A better understanding of the agriculture-nature-markets-food nexus should lead to proposals for interventions more suited to making agriculture more nutrient-sensitive and vice versa.

Description

The project focuses on dietary quality, mainly measured by a diversity indicator (number of food groups covered by food intake over the last 24 hours) which translates the probability of an individual covering their micronutrient requirements (vitamins and minerals). It combines modelling, empirical surveys, and action research in Burkina Faso, in order to answer the following questions:

  • What are the relations and interactions between production diversity, natural resources, supply practices on the markets and food diversity at individual and household level?
  • How does dietary diversity relate to the resilience of farm households, defined as their ability to overcome different types of shocks over the long term?
  • What are the opportunities and bottlenecks for households and individuals to maintain an adequate level of diversity, both all year round and over the long term? 
  • How can interventions sensitive to nutritional challenges, but also agricultural challenges, more effectively harness those opportunities and address the bottlenecks?

Starting from the assumption that insufficient food diversity arises from multiple and interlinked causality schemes, the project is based on a combination of disciplinary outlooks (geographers, foresters, modellers, economists, nutritionists, sociologists, political scientists, agronomists) on different scales (individuals, households, markets, landscapes, plots).

Expected changes

The importance of dietary diversity for healthy children and adults is not seen as a problem at policy or household level. The priority remains on cereals. Policies function in silos at all national and territorial levels with, on the one hand, agriculture which pays little attention to food or nutritional issues and, on the other hand, health which poorly integrates agricultural realities. At household level, food diversity is not a category of thought for either women or men, and agricultural decisions are disconnected from dietary diversity considerations.

Dietary diversity is very poor throughout the year. Eighty percent of the women interviewed presented a risk for micronutrient deficiencies. Cereals, generally a corn gruel (Tô), form the staple diet. An inventory of sauce recipes to accompany them shows good potential for diversity but, in practice, the sauces are often too simple. Some major foodstuffs for nutritional quality (pulses, eggs, meat, dairy products) are found on many farms, but are mostly intended for sale or savings. Others (such as mangoes) are highly seasonal. Wild plant and animal resources are less available than in the past. Some diversified foods are available on the markets, but most families cannot afford them.

Being in charge of sauces, women are at the heart of dietary diversity. Their power counts: when it increases, food diversity improves. No individual inequalities of access to food diversity are found during meals at home. However, those family members having the possibility of eating outside the home (especially children in school canteens) often have better dietary diversity. 

Operational Recommendations

The projet work identified various levers for improving the dietary diversity of farming households:

  1. Decompartmentalize nutrition and agriculture issues, at ministerial level (via cross-sector training for staff), at project level (through greater dialogue between agricultural and nutritional experts), and at household level (involving both women and men); 
  2. Design some information drives on food diversity adapted to the context by making use of local resources and knowledge regarding farming and food; 
  3. Encourage plant and animal products that are nutritionally varied and versatile in the sense that they can be a source of food and a source of income (e.g. cowpea); 
  4. Develop storage techniques for perishable goods of high nutritional potential; 
  5. Maintain and develop school canteens, supplied locally if possible.

Contract partners : Gret, Iram, IRD, Institut de l'Environnement et de Recherches agricoles du Burkina Faso (Inera), Institut de Recherche en Sciences appliquées et Technologies (Irsat, institut spécialisé du Centre National de la Recherche scientifique et technologique (CNRST) du Burkina Faso.