Ethiopia

In all of our work, we strive to follow one of the most basic principles of community development: help when and where you are asked to help. We don’t approach communities and tell them what they need. Instead, we go when invited and help communities be able to meet their own needs by partnering with them, using our technical skills, knowledge, and experience as a fulcrum for the leverage that they need in their lives. One such story is from Ethiopia.

Through a partner organization, Injibara University in Ethiopia reached out with a request for a nutrition expert to teach professors in the Nutrition and Agriculture Departments. Leslie answered the request and came to the university for a week of theoretical learning, followed by a week of practical application.

With a class of 13 professors from the two departments, Leslie spent the week training them on nutrition programming. Following the principles of action research, Leslie taught the class about qualitative methods for gathering data, common nutrition data collection methods, reviewing the data to find solutions to stated problems, and designing a program based on community input. The students had the opportunity to practice with a real-world plan from Leslie’s work with refugees in Bangladesh.

Leslie also taught them about program evaluation. This is a key part in program design and implementation so that progress and accomplishments can be tracked. They practiced writing outcome statements and creating indicators for collecting data to determine if they are meeting their program’s targets. She taught them that the purpose of program evaluation is to make informed decisions about the program, being able to make adjustments as needed, as well as being able to showcase the work of a program with definitive data to back up their proven work.

Finally, it was time to put it into practice. Local clinics had reached out to the university to ask for community nutrition classes for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and it worked out perfectly to practice community nutrition programming in this context. Leslie worked with the professors to design what needed to be shared in the community classes, taking into account the local context. What types of foods are available? What do people typically eat? What are the areas needed for improvement? What questions to community members have about how to feed their families? It was also the Lenten fasting season in Ethiopia, which meant that no cooking demonstrations would be able to contain animal products if people were to engage in them.

Over the course of several days, a total of 66 women received training on childhood feeding. The women were targeted as either pregnant, breastfeeding, or having a child in the home under the age of two. The first 1000 days of life—from conception to age two—are the most critical for establishing healthy growth in children, which is why many nutrition programs target this population for programming and education.

One of the great accomplishments of this work was the lasting impact for the university professors. As some of them had no prior experience in community nutrition, it was an exciting opportunity to get outside of the world of academia and participate in something that impacted the local community. The classes on action research for nutrition programming fit well with the university’s mission statement that emphasizes “problem-solving research and demand-driven community services.” This is exactly what Leslie’s classes taught the professors to do in a nutrition context. As nutrition and agriculture students go through their coursework, they in turn will have the opportunity to learn how to design community nutrition programs, and the university will have the opportunity to incorporate real-world projects into their programming.

This is what Fulcrum Missions is about. It is not about us going somewhere with all of the knowledge and skills and being direct implementers of the program. Instead, it is about training local community members, based on their identified problems and community needs, how to do the work. In this way, much more will be accomplished than we can ever hope to do on our own.