Hi all, very sorry for anyone waiting for news. Of course a lot has happened since my last post, way back then around Thanksgiving. I went home to the US for about 5 weeks in December/January. It was of course wonderful, and I'm quite the lucky PCV to spend the holidays with my family two years in a row, as well as seeing friends and doing a bit of travelling. And I managed to not seriously injure myself, despite my skiing worries, and returned to Tanzania in mid-January burn free this time!
A lot of people asked me about the World Food Programme (WFP) while I was home and what specifically I'll be working on this year as an extendee. Some basic info about WFP...
According to Wikipedia, WFP is "the food assistance branch of the United Nations, and it is the world's largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger." Through offices in 80 countries around the world, WFP is estimated to provide food assistance to 90 million people a year. Although much of WFP's focus is on feeding refugees and providing relief in emergency situations - after the earthquake in Haiti, for example - there are also programs operating in relatively stable countries, like Tanzania, to help address long-term food insecurity. WFP is working to alleviate food shortages at the regional, district, and household levels within several drought-prone regions in Tanzania.
According to WFP, "Tanzania is among the African countries with the highest levels of malnutrition. Some 42 percent of children under five are stunted, eight out of ten children under one are anaemic, and about a third of children aged 6-59 months are Vitamin A deficient. Poor nutrition is also a serious problem among women of reproductive age, with more than half of pregnant women anaemic and one in ten women undernourished." I can't emphasize enough how detrimental micronutrient deficiency ("hidden hunger") is to a child, adversely affecting them for the rest of their life. Poor nutrition during intrauterine years up to the first two years of life not only causes physical stunting (smaller, shorter children and adults) but also greatly affects cognitive development; lower IQs, difficulties learning, decreased attention spans, behavioral problems and poor social skills have all been linked to poor nutrition, especially in those critical early years. This results in smaller, weaker adults less productive at doing physical labor and therfore less productive earners. This also results in lower educational achievement and therefore lower job potential and income. Over the course of one's lifetime, this can add up to a serious loss in earnings (and can then affect one's ability to properly feed and educate their own children, and on and on and on...). But back to WFP...
I work at the Dodoma sub-office, where we conduct program implementation, monitoring and evaluation of three country programs and one pilot initiative for central Tanzania:
1. Food for Education (FFE)
2. Food for Assets (FFA)
WFP implements projects to encourage low-income, food-insecure households to participate in activities that contribute to their long-term food security. Community members are given take home food rations in exchange for work on infrastucture projects such as irrigation, terracing, soil and water conservation. A district focal person is always involved in coordinating the project, usually the district agricultural engineer.
These can be huge scale projects; I visited one village where nearly 900 villagers came together in one month to build 1.7 km of road to take their produce to market and dug many more kilometers of irrigation canals along the road and out to their farms. Very impressive!
3. Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN)
WFP provides monthly take-home food rations (porridge, maize, pulses, oil) via selected rural health clinics to improve the nutritional status of vulnerable women and children. To address high stunting rates, WFP provides blanket food assistance to all pregnant and nursing women attending the clinic, and all babies aged 6-24 months. Moderately malnourished children up to age 5 as well as pregnant and nursing mothers also receive supplementary food rations.
This is one of my favorite projects to monitor...I love going to the clinics and seeing lots of mamas and cute little babies getting weighed and measured!
4. Purchase for Progress (P4P)
WFP is working to connect farmers to agricultural markets through its P4P initiative, and assisting them in becoming competitive players in the market place. WFP buys directly from farmer cooperatives through a tendering process and also engages in training and warehouse rehabilitation to help farmers reduce post-harvest losses. The food that WFP buys through P4P, for example maize, gets stored in WFP warehouses and gets redistributed as part of our food basket to other programs (for example, to FFE schools).
We have just one field monitor in Dodoma working on this project and I've never participated in a field visit, so I don't know much more about it. Sounds interesting from an agricultural economics point of view, though.
Ok, so what about my job specifically? I'm part of the M&E team, which mostly consists of going on field visits, which are called "missions" in UN speak, for the various projects. All projects have the same basic monitoring aspects, such as doing a physical count of their food stock, checking for proper record keeping, ensuring that the food is being properly stored, ensuring the food is actually being distributed and hasn't been stolen, talking to the community members/health workers/teachers in charge, talking to the beneficiaries, etc. FFA is the least straightforward, as you are following-up not only on food storage/distribution but also on the progress of a large scale project that happens to also involve large amounts of district support and money (which is often late or needs some pushing along). WFP has a pretty strict no bullshit policy when it comes to problem schools/communities (e.g. the food is being stolen/sold or they won't follow through with the requirements like building a storeroom) and is quick to pull out food and end assistance. This is the less fun part of the job, because I know that my decision to stop food shipments means that a lot of students or a lot of community members will suffer all because of the corruptness/incompetence/apathy of just a few. A monitoring mission typically consists of one WFP field monitor, a WFP driver, and at least one district official. For the last couple months I've been tagging a long with experienced field monitors to learn about each project and get the hang of monitoring, but in two weeks I'll be all grown up and go on my first mission by myself...wish me luck!
All in all I'm enjoying it so far. This last month has been pretty busy, travelling about every other week which gets pretty exhausting. But I do like feeling productive and going out to see villages and interacting with villagers (without relying on public transport!). It's super busy at the office now and starting tomorrow I will be travelling for basically a month straight so I will be very ready for a long Easter weekend...hopefully I can find a beach to lie down on :) Anyways, I think that's about it for now. If you have any more questions I'm always happy to answer them. Hope all is well stateside!
Oh, and I added lots of pics to Picasa...check them out!
A lot of people asked me about the World Food Programme (WFP) while I was home and what specifically I'll be working on this year as an extendee. Some basic info about WFP...
According to Wikipedia, WFP is "the food assistance branch of the United Nations, and it is the world's largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger." Through offices in 80 countries around the world, WFP is estimated to provide food assistance to 90 million people a year. Although much of WFP's focus is on feeding refugees and providing relief in emergency situations - after the earthquake in Haiti, for example - there are also programs operating in relatively stable countries, like Tanzania, to help address long-term food insecurity. WFP is working to alleviate food shortages at the regional, district, and household levels within several drought-prone regions in Tanzania.
According to WFP, "Tanzania is among the African countries with the highest levels of malnutrition. Some 42 percent of children under five are stunted, eight out of ten children under one are anaemic, and about a third of children aged 6-59 months are Vitamin A deficient. Poor nutrition is also a serious problem among women of reproductive age, with more than half of pregnant women anaemic and one in ten women undernourished." I can't emphasize enough how detrimental micronutrient deficiency ("hidden hunger") is to a child, adversely affecting them for the rest of their life. Poor nutrition during intrauterine years up to the first two years of life not only causes physical stunting (smaller, shorter children and adults) but also greatly affects cognitive development; lower IQs, difficulties learning, decreased attention spans, behavioral problems and poor social skills have all been linked to poor nutrition, especially in those critical early years. This results in smaller, weaker adults less productive at doing physical labor and therfore less productive earners. This also results in lower educational achievement and therefore lower job potential and income. Over the course of one's lifetime, this can add up to a serious loss in earnings (and can then affect one's ability to properly feed and educate their own children, and on and on and on...). But back to WFP...
I work at the Dodoma sub-office, where we conduct program implementation, monitoring and evaluation of three country programs and one pilot initiative for central Tanzania:
1. Food for Education (FFE)
WFP provides two* meals a day to primary school students at selected schools. WFP delivers bags of fortified porridge mix that the school cooks for a morning meal. Maize, pulses (beans, pigeon peas, etc.), and vegetable oil serve as an afternoon meal of ugali (the Tanzanian staple, a stiff porridge made from mixing ground corn meal with boiling water, served with a side of beans) or makande (stew of maize and beans). Not only does this ensure that children get atleast two relatively nutritious meals a day (children are typically last when it comes to getting food), but it also provides a strong motivation for children to actually come to school and increases their ability to pay attention. For some schools lacking access to water, WFP also helps to construct rain water harvesting systems. In exchange for food, the districts and schools build a storeroom for the food, a kitchen, wood-saving stoves, and pay cooks' wages.
As a former teacher in Tanzania, I would have loved for my students to receive school meals. At school from about 7am until 2pm, most ate absolutely nothing (and drank no water). It is extremely difficult to teach hungry students with no energy!
*In the next few months, WFP is phasing out delivery of the morning porridge mix. Each community will then be responsible for providing their students a morning meal. I have mixed feelings about this; not only will the majority of communities not do this, but if they do, it will be less nutritious than the fortified blend we were giving them (i.e. just more ground maize and water made into a less stiff porridge). On the other hand, it encourages more community contribution, ownership, and sustainability. More on this after we see the results...
WFP implements projects to encourage low-income, food-insecure households to participate in activities that contribute to their long-term food security. Community members are given take home food rations in exchange for work on infrastucture projects such as irrigation, terracing, soil and water conservation. A district focal person is always involved in coordinating the project, usually the district agricultural engineer.
These can be huge scale projects; I visited one village where nearly 900 villagers came together in one month to build 1.7 km of road to take their produce to market and dug many more kilometers of irrigation canals along the road and out to their farms. Very impressive!
3. Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN)
WFP provides monthly take-home food rations (porridge, maize, pulses, oil) via selected rural health clinics to improve the nutritional status of vulnerable women and children. To address high stunting rates, WFP provides blanket food assistance to all pregnant and nursing women attending the clinic, and all babies aged 6-24 months. Moderately malnourished children up to age 5 as well as pregnant and nursing mothers also receive supplementary food rations.
This is one of my favorite projects to monitor...I love going to the clinics and seeing lots of mamas and cute little babies getting weighed and measured!
4. Purchase for Progress (P4P)
WFP is working to connect farmers to agricultural markets through its P4P initiative, and assisting them in becoming competitive players in the market place. WFP buys directly from farmer cooperatives through a tendering process and also engages in training and warehouse rehabilitation to help farmers reduce post-harvest losses. The food that WFP buys through P4P, for example maize, gets stored in WFP warehouses and gets redistributed as part of our food basket to other programs (for example, to FFE schools).
We have just one field monitor in Dodoma working on this project and I've never participated in a field visit, so I don't know much more about it. Sounds interesting from an agricultural economics point of view, though.
Ok, so what about my job specifically? I'm part of the M&E team, which mostly consists of going on field visits, which are called "missions" in UN speak, for the various projects. All projects have the same basic monitoring aspects, such as doing a physical count of their food stock, checking for proper record keeping, ensuring that the food is being properly stored, ensuring the food is actually being distributed and hasn't been stolen, talking to the community members/health workers/teachers in charge, talking to the beneficiaries, etc. FFA is the least straightforward, as you are following-up not only on food storage/distribution but also on the progress of a large scale project that happens to also involve large amounts of district support and money (which is often late or needs some pushing along). WFP has a pretty strict no bullshit policy when it comes to problem schools/communities (e.g. the food is being stolen/sold or they won't follow through with the requirements like building a storeroom) and is quick to pull out food and end assistance. This is the less fun part of the job, because I know that my decision to stop food shipments means that a lot of students or a lot of community members will suffer all because of the corruptness/incompetence/apathy of just a few. A monitoring mission typically consists of one WFP field monitor, a WFP driver, and at least one district official. For the last couple months I've been tagging a long with experienced field monitors to learn about each project and get the hang of monitoring, but in two weeks I'll be all grown up and go on my first mission by myself...wish me luck!
All in all I'm enjoying it so far. This last month has been pretty busy, travelling about every other week which gets pretty exhausting. But I do like feeling productive and going out to see villages and interacting with villagers (without relying on public transport!). It's super busy at the office now and starting tomorrow I will be travelling for basically a month straight so I will be very ready for a long Easter weekend...hopefully I can find a beach to lie down on :) Anyways, I think that's about it for now. If you have any more questions I'm always happy to answer them. Hope all is well stateside!
Oh, and I added lots of pics to Picasa...check them out!
Glad to see you blogging again. Miss hearing about your exploits from Katie! Stay safe!
ReplyDeleteKaren (Katie's Mom)