The village gurus training mothers to tackle hunger in Chad
Women in remote communities are being taught to by ‘maman lumieres’ to respond to signs of undernutrition in their children
“Since I live in the village, I go to meet with the maman lumieres at least five times per month, sometimes more, with my questions and concerns about my baby,” says Zara Moustapha.
The maman lumieres — literally ‘light mothers’ — are a somewhat quirky feature of a project the World Food Programme (WFP) is running in conjunction with partners in Chad, where according to the latest figures, 40 percent of children are undernourished.
Women from the community are appointed as founts of knowledge for community members who have questions regarding the health and overall wellbeing of their children. For mothers like Zara, the maman lumieres offer invaluable support.
Project FARN (Homebased Learning for Nutritional Rehabilitation) is the result of a collaboration between WFP, its sister UN agency the Food and Agriculture Organization, and local NGOs. The aim is to end child hunger by teaching mothers how to identify signs of undernutrition and provide them with the means to tackle it.
Infrequent rainfall in a number of regions has led to losses in agricultural productivity in Chad, making it difficult to secure enough food for the entire population of 14.9 million people.
“Things have changed a lot here,” says Zara. “Before you would have to go all the way to the central health centre to get any advice on malnutrition or to even get your child a check-up.” She adds: “Now these are services that we can easily find in our village. We can get advice and we have learned a lot. Besides, going all the way to the hospital just to see if our kid is okay is a really long way.”
Scorching-hot sand is boundless in Kekedina. Before Project FARN came into being, 5 km of dunes separated mothers in this village from the health centre and, in turn, information about their child’s health.
In addition to the advice the maman lumieres provide for the community, they also offer their homes as a meeting place where women are taught through interactive games about the benefits of balanced nutrition and exclusive breastfeeding — where the infant only receives breast milk.
But advice and games are not enough to combat undernutrition. So, through additional land-rehabilitation projects nearby, sponsored by WFP, community members have learned to cultivate their own food, much of which is used in the fortified concoction the community is using to stop malnutrition. Key to this is bouillie, a staple breakfast cereal.
“We first have to look for the ingredients for the cereal, like corn, or beans,” says Kakaye Choukou, one of the women the village of Kekedina elected to lead the others as a maman lumiere or guiding mother.
“We dry them and cook them again, then we mix in peanuts, then ground them all up… All the villages around can find the ingredients for enriched bouillie pretty easily.”
In the year since Project FARN was launched, Choukou’s noticed a major decrease in severe cases of malnutrition in her community.
“There were children who were malnourished, we used the enriched bouille to treat them,” says Choukou. “There are many who have recovered and others who are recovering. We’re still looking for other children around who may be malnourished so we can integrate them into the programme as well. We started with 50 cases and now we have about 20”.
WFP and its partners are working to save lives by securing both access to and knowledge of nutritional support in remote communities in Chad.
In Kekedina, the agricultural activities in the community wadi–the rehabilitated dried riverbed turned farmland where the community grows its food — are helping the community respond to the second-largest cause of undernourishment: lack of rainfall.
“Our biggest problem, even for those who work in the wadi to cultivate their own food, is rainfall,” says Harmatou Ibrahim, a maman lumiere and a worker in the wadi. “When it doesn’t rain, and when it rains very little, there is less food and less to give to our children. But the techniques to help conserve water are helping us learn to produce food over the course of the year.”
