A nutritious neighbourhood

“My family and I are doing better,” Dorica told us. “[Now] I only go to the children’s clinics, or when we contract malaria, but not due to my children being underweight or malnourished.”

Dorica Richard, 33, works as a tea farmer in the Sukambizi Association Trust, Mulanje District, Malawi. Her community used to struggle, since much of their farming was devoted to tea crops, and local diets and cooking techniques often didn’t provide enough nutrition.

In 2020, ETP and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) launched Healthy Diets for Tea Communities, a programme with the specific aim of improving access to nutritious foods for Malawian tea workers and farmers like Dorica and their families.

Gaining knowledge

“We started with the food calendar to understand the kinds of food we can find in specific seasons and how we can preserve them,” Dorica told us.

Next, she and her neighbours were supported to start growing new, diverse crops, and to create their own kitchen gardens. “They gave us biofortified crops that we started planting, such as orange maize, orange sweet potato and beans.

“They also gave us seeds for our kitchen gardens,” Dorica explained, “such as kamganje (Ethiopian mustard), mustard and tomato, so that we have different varieties of food.”

Sharing knowledge

The last step was to help people cook food in a way that maximises nutrition. To do this, the project established monthly cooking demonstrations of healthy recipes.

Dorica told us the project is now helping her create meals for her family with a variety of local staples, vegetables, fruit, legumes, fats, and animal foods like meat and eggs.

“We always eat fresh food,” she said, “and it helps us save money that we might have spent buying the vegetables we now have.”

The project also promoted handwashing using soap, a simple, effective, and sustainable intervention to reduce diarrhoeal diseases that contribute to malnourishment.

“Our children are healthy”

When we met her, Dorica was breastfeeding her fourth child. She was happy that the project may have helped her improve her weight. “While undergoing nutrition training, I became pregnant and I could see the difference in my weight between my first and second pregnancy,” she told us.

“During my first pregnancy, I carried twins, but my weight was around 69 kg. [My twins] weighed 2.4 kg or less,” she explains. “But in my second pregnancy while participating in the nutrition club, I weighed around 89 kg and the baby weighed 3.6 kg.”

Dorica has seen similar results across her community. “If you go to the hospital, they will tell you that children from our village are not malnourished.”

“We are a lot better because we are free from disease and our children are healthy.”