Increasing Nutrition and Resilience Through Diversified Micro Home Enterprises
This project is 3 years in length running from September 1, 2019 to August 30, 2022. This is a report for the period December 1, 2021 - February 28, 2022 (Months 10, 11, 12)
Graduate & Neighbor Gardens
Since the project’s inception, we have installed 229 gardens for Malnutrition Program Graduates and 490 gardens for the neighbors of these individuals. As of the end of this reporting period, we have completed 719 of 720 gardens. However, as we have yet to reach the goal of 540 Neighbor Gardens we will be focusing our efforts to install another 50 Neighbor Gardens during the next reporting period. 2,009 home garden visits have been conducted.
Nutrition and Resilience
We concluded one 12-week gardening cycle with 90 beneficiaries on February 18th. A second 12-week cycle was started on February 21th and will finish May 13, 2022. We did not have any issues procuring supplies during this reporting period. However, we did note that some prices had increased with inflation.
Business
We have now reached our goal of launching 144 businesses by distributing 144 of the first business package (Business Kit #1). We will continue to distribute the second installment of the business package to participants as they qualify for their second installment of business goods. As of the end of February, we have distributed 118 installments of the second business kit. We will be distributing an additional 26 kits to meet this goal. We want to thank S.H.A.R.E. for helping us to arrive at this exciting milestone. The goal of the business program has always been two-fold: to empower caregivers with a means to care for themselves and their children and to help reduce the risk of Severe Acute Malnutrition relapse in the vulnerable period following recovery. The readmission rate for this period was 0.6% with just two children requiring readmission. Most of the beneficiaries that received Business Kits between April 2020 and March 2022 had no source of income when they arrived at the Center. Many were trying to make ends meet for 4 or more children with very low levels of education and literacy.
- 91% of recipients had no means of income upon arrival at the Malnutrition Treatment Center
- 30% of all participants had been without a means of income for 12 months or longer
- The average number of school years attended by participants was 3.4
- The average household size is 7 people (with four of those household members being children)
- At the time of admission, the average number of adults in the household who had worked one or more hours in the previous week was <1 (0.9)
- 17% of participants had no prior school attendance, with 31% describing themselves as illiterate
