A place for the SUN? Scaling Up Nutrition in the Horn of Africa

Post by Liya Dejene (ILRI)

During Day 2 of the AgriKnowledge ShareFair in Addis Ababa, Bibi Giyose (Senior Food Security and Nutrition Advisor at the Africa Union) facilitated a panel session on the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement.



SUN is a country-led movement that brings organizations together across sectors to support national plans to scale up nutrition by helping to ensure that financial and technical resources are accessible, coordinated, predictable and ready to go to scale. The SUN movement promotes the implementation of evidenced-based nutrition interventions, as well as integration of nutrition goals into sectors including health, social protection, development and agriculture.

At the center of the movement is national level leadership that coordinates both national and international efforts, with the SUN movement aligning financial and technical support with country plans. Leadership at the national level ensures that priorities and programs are designed and implemented to meet the needs of regions and populations within the country and to enable the scale up of sustainable efforts.

The ‘Thousand Days’ partnership supports the SUN movement by focusing attention on the 1,000 day window of opportunity for impact: Engaging government, civil society, and the private sector in efforts to improve early nutrition; and promoting partnerships across these sectors to achieve a scale change in improving early nutrition.

Juliawati Untoro (UNICEF), Martin Ahimbisibwe (WFP) and Juliette Aphane (FAO) explored ways to integrate nutrition in related sectors, using indicators of under-nutrition as one of the key measures of overall progress.

In her summary, Bibi highlighted 4 main points:

First, the session focused on how to actively promote and scale up nutrition in different countries. In East Africa there are six countries that are committed to scaling up nutrition; they include Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. Second, the group looked at how to best improve a multi-sectoral approach for better nutrition and better food security.

Second, looking at how best nutrition can be managed within countries, nutrition coordination has to be at the highest level, nutrition has to be coordinated from ministries, or the offices of the prime minister, or the office of the president because only they have the authority, the mandate and the clout to hold all the other sectors accountable.

Third, we need to build capacity so the various sectors are able to deliver according to their mandates, from the highest levels all the way down to where the action is.

Fourth, it is clear that there need to be sustainability mechanisms built into these programs. Through the SUN movement, the emphasis is on a country-led and country-owned approach. “This means that resources have to be mobilized from within the government so that programs can be started and programs can be sustained, while at the same time agreeing that it is important to work across sectors, to work with the development partners to deliver on the best food and nutrition security.”

Approaches which “Save and Grow” in the Horn of Africa

Many if not all countries of the Horn of Africa region have expressed an interest in the sustainable increase in productivity of crop production in their countries. Here, the challenge is to produce more in ways which do not compromise the future. Yields can be boosted in the short term, but practices may lead to land degradation, contamination of water resources, future pest or disease outbreaks, loss of biodiversity.

Sustainable Intensification is one of the key topics covered at the AgriKnowledge ShareFair on October 24th. 

FAO promotes practices for intensifying crop production which are not only environmentally sustainable – increasing production while conserving vital “ecosystem services” , and mitigating climate change - but which are also socially and economically sustainable. 

What does this mean, to be “socially” sustainable? A practice (such as reduced tillage) may be better for the environment, but it may also increase the amount of labour required, for instance to manage weeds. In traditional societies, land preparation may be regarded as “men’s work”, while increasing the effort for weeding may place a disproportionate and unsustainable burden on women. Similarly, for practices which are good for the environment to be adopted at scale they must also deliver economic benefits in the short term. Trade offs work both ways . Greater inefficiencies could be gained by concentrating on a small number of crops but smallholders with limited access to land have evolved highly diverse patterns of cultivation.
How to address these complex challenges to the adoption of improved practices in crop production is among the topics covered in the FAO publication Save and Grow a policy makers guide to the intensification of smallholder crop production available at: http://www.fao.org/ag/save-and-grow/.

Livestock Learning Pathway: Feedback from the 'Grassroots Group'

By Beth Cullen

On Day One of the Agknowledge Africa sharefair in Addis Ababa I participated in the Livestock Learning Pathway. To start the session we engaged in a mapping exercise in order to acquaint ourselves with one another and to learn more about where people came from. As a result of this mapping exercise we divided into three groups. Each group represented different levels of the livestock sector: policy level, project level and grassroots level. I was part of the Grassroots Group, interestingly the smallest group consisting of only three people: Yared Girma, Felician Ncheye and myself, Beth Cullen. As a group we shared our experiences of livestock related Knowledge Management.

Felician from Tanzania told us about his experiences of sharing best practice of livestock activities at community level. He explained that his work involves packaging and sharing knowledge using a variety of techniques, including CDs, publications, radio broadcasts and experience sharing visits. He has also been involved in organising a committee for livestock, agriculture and fisheries. This committee works to encourage and mobilise peers and to strategise.

Yared from Ethiopia works in the apiculture sector for a Beekeepers Association. The Association currently has approximately 450 members. The Association works to transfer technical knowledge of modern beekeeping techniques in order to build the capacity of its members. They also supply beekeeping equipment. The members process honey and beeswax manually and collect the produce together as an association. This is sold at market places and display centres to nearby communities. The Head office is in Adama (Nazret) in Oromia Region with local offices in various locations.

I shared my experiences of working with Karrayyu Oromo pastoralists in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia using participatory video as a way of conducting participatory and collaborative research. The video was used to direct the research process and was used by community members to document their knowledge, culture and perspectives. Community members focused on pastoralism as a way of life, the importance of animals, the environment and indigenous institutions. The method has a variety of applications for both research and development.

As part of our knowledge sharing we also discussed some of the key issues each of us have been battling with in our work and we visualised the discussion in the form of a map. For Felician the main challenges he has been facing are the identification of markets and securing good prices. Weather can be a problem for livestock keepers, particularly drought periods. There are also insufficient resources, for example lack of funds and equipment. Another problem he identified was the lack of knowledge and information at local level in order to tackle the above mentioned problems adequately. Yared faced some similar difficulties in terms of price fluctuation of honey, beeswax and beekeeping products. He also experiences problems with supply, shortage of finance and access to land for beekeeing, and difficulties packaging products. There are also challenges regarding putting some aspects of the technical knowledge into practice. In my work with the Karrayyu there is a challenge in terms of how to take the PV work further and convey the messages of community members to people at higher level and how to further develop the method for more applied contexts.

After we had discussed in our individual groups we fed back to the other groups and shared experience between the different levels. The discussions and sharing process was very useful in terms of gaining more knowledge of KM activities in different areas of the livestock sector and understanding some of the challenges people are facing in different settings.

Read more about the livestock pathway discussions:

• Addis share fair focuses on ways to create, share and use livestock knowledge


• Livestock Pathways: Mending the Broken Link


• Livestock Pathways: Mapping actors and knowledge sharing processes

Livestock Pathways: Mending the Broken Link

Post by Beatrice Ouma

What kind of information would you gather if you gave a video recorder to a group of Ethiopian women and left them to film their daily lives? Turns out a lot! Bridging the gap between researchers, organizations and farmer organization was the theme for the livestock pathways discussions on Day 2.

Experts from different countries from Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Italy and India presented very innovative tools they are using to create, manage and share knowledge. The session was building on to the previous day discussions that mapped the information sharing landscape in livestock systems.

Participants then formed small groups around the topics they were interested in. One of them was the use of mobile phones to collect data and share information on farm level and market diagnostics as was demonstrated by projects from Kenya and Malawi. Other projects included participatory knowledge sharing through videos and photos, a web-based electronic source of information on selected indigenous farm animal genetic resources (breeds/ecotypes of cattle, sheep, goats, chicken and pigs) in the developing countries. IFAD has a web portal that connects different levels of information creators and users, such portals will lead to better designed projects, better implementation and better impacts.

The livestock sector is witnessing the power technology has! A lot of information is being collected through web based databases, mobile phones, videos and photos. Our job therefore is to make this information accessible, simple and useful to the communities we are working with.
A four finger score! That’s what the participant gave the session, out of a possible five finger score.


Read more about the livestock pathway discussions:

• Livestock Learning Pathway: Feedback from the 'Grassroots Group'
  
• Addis share fair focuses on ways to create, share and use livestock knowledge


• Livestock Pathways: Mapping actors and knowledge sharing processes

Livestock Pathways: Mapping actors and knowledge sharing processes

Posted by Beatrice Ouma

The livestock pathway kicked off today with a series of mapping exercises to start exploring the landscape and the actors involved.

Some 25 participants joined in and started orienting themselves around different 'maps', looking at the different perspectives they have on livestock, the network connections present in the room, the country they are working in, and the different target audience they engage with. On this basis, 3 tables where formed with participants working respectively at the grassroots level, in projects, and in organisations. On each table, participants were asked to map out their knowledge sharing and management activities, and the key issue they are facing.

The 'project' group identified three key areas of knowledge management.

1. Seeding ideas: As communicators, seeding ideas is a very important part of our knowledge sharing. We are offering new platforms for people to develop big ideas, achieve big dreams and goals. One of those platforms is the Shujaaz comic magazine that strives to inspire Kenyan youth by packaging agricultural information in a comical manner.
2. Removing bottlenecks: A lot of the times information management at project level involves removing bottlenecks, getting people to see new ways of doing things. In a project, the primary target audience is our beneficiary farmers, and we are always looking for new and innovative means of exchanging information with the farmers.
3. Sharing stories: At the project level, there are a lot of livestock stories in the field that we always want to get out. We share stories with our beneficiaries, like-minded NGOs, policy makers, donors and the general public. However, sharing stories can also present some challenges such as the one we identified as 'last mile connection': in the attempt to share information with our beneficiaries, we always go through networks and partners who might not pass the information to the beneficiary.

The group pointed out also at some challenges related to knowledge sharing. In particular, we discussed the following:

• Organizational memory: when the people with the knowledge leave, what happens?
• Lost in translation: Are we sharing information in the right language?
• Short-term funds: How can we achieve so much with so little?
• Documenting learning: How do we synthesize information for future reference?
• Slow Policy Change? Are there ways of speeding policy change?
• Applying appropriate technologies: Are we using a saw to cut a pizza?

The other 2 tables undertook a similar exercise. See the key points and issues they raised in the video below here:

Tomorrow the discussion will continue with the sharing experiences and the brokerage sessions, and the group will seek to find answers to the questions that emerged, as well as other effective ways to share knowledge.

Read more about the livestock pathway discussions:

• Livestock Learning Pathway: Feedback from the 'Grassroots Group'
  
• Addis share fair focuses on ways to create, share and use livestock knowledge


• Livestock Pathways: Mending the Broken Link