Healthy Diets for Tea Communities

The programme worked on different areas in each country context, but focused on:

• Increasing demand for nutritious foods through interactive communication and education activities interventions which improve people’s food knowledge and choices, for example training, street theatre or cooking demonstrations.
• Increasing access to nutritious food through a variety of methods, including vegetable gardens, fruits trees and fortified lunches at work.
• Improving the enabling environment by promoting the importance of investing in workforce nutrition programmes to businesses and governments.

In Malawi, training sessions supported farmers to learn how to grow biofortified crops and improve their access to nutritious foods.

In India, the programme showed tea workers how to make improvements to their diets. Street plays, home visits and cooking competitions were all used to engage communities, while local shops increased their range of nutritious food.

In Kenya, tea farmers and workers took part in training sessions at tea buying centres to improve their knowledge of healthy diets. Radio programmes increased reach, and nutritious foods was promoted in local shops and markets.

• The initiative has increased demand and access to nutritious food among the participating communities.
• Nutrition education sessions reached 27,205 farmers and workers, while radio spots on the local breakfast show reached an average of 264,048 people over three weeks.
• We distributed seeds for crops to around 10,000 farmers, hosted 52 cooking demonstrations, and 11 cooking competitions in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.

The project team also took part in a knowledge sharing-forum with a range of government departments, private sector actors, non-profits and research groups.