| Project Detail |
Objectives
Establish 53 decentralized OFSP vine multiplication sites operated by trained development agents and selected farmers; and provide 15,000 households with the inputs and knowledge needed to grow the crop.
Raise awareness among at least 15,000 women and 10,000 men of the benefits of OFSP and how to cook it for best nutrition.
Improve supply of and demand for OFSP in urban areas, prompting consumption by over 60,000 urban beneficiaries.
After evaluating results over three years, recommend models for large-scale dissemination of OFSP within the region’s agricultural extension and health promotion systems.
Approach
Operating in densely populated districts 1,200–2,500 meters above sea level, the project support farming communities who mainly grow coffee, khat and false banana on their smallholdings, 0.4 ha on average. Food insecurity is moderate and dietary diversity low. The project takes an integrated agriculture, nutrition and market implementation approach using vitamin A-rich, early-maturing, OFSP as an entry point. It builds on experience highlighting the importance of educating communities—including men—on how to gain maximum nutrition from the crop, especially when feeding young children. Activities engage the public agriculture and health extension system, and support development and promotion of locally-adapted processed products.
The International Potato Center (CIP) has already developed training manuals—available in Ethiopia’s principle language Amharic—and ‘training of trainer’ course structures appropriate to the region. The project forms part of the ‘Sweetpotato for Profit and Health Initiative’, a multi-partner intervention that seeks to improve the lives of 10 million African households by 2020. This initiative has already helped to change the image of sweetpotato from being viewed as a subsistence crop produced by poor women to a healthy food choice and profitable enterprise for all. Existing links with local, national and international organizations will be further developed.
Gender-sensitive formative research on child nutrition and the sweetpotato value chain has been used to finetune training programs and vine dissemination strategies. Agronomic and communication research will produce practi-cal guidelines to support OFSP farming
and marketing, and evidence will be collected to justify the scaling out the approach to other areas. Equality of benefits for women and men will be ensured by conducting a detailed base-line assessment and using the results to improve the implementation strategy |
