Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. HAD African policy-makers, development agencies and nutritionists succeeded in embedding nutrition messages into the social fabric, malnutrition wouldn’t be high in African communities that are blessed with abundant and diverse food systems.
By treating nutrition activities as sporadic news, the media has failed to make a difference in malnutrition.
Drama and road shows have been ineffective because audiences remember the jokes and gifts like T-shirts or sweets thrown around during road shows, but forget the serious underlying messages.
Besides gobbling a lot of money that should go directly to communities, flyers and formal advertisements have been the worst failure because people can pick up the exaggeration that is hidden behind persuasive advertisements.
Associating nutrition with mothers and baby clinics would be effective if it did not alienate men who should lead the adoption of nutrition as decision-makers and heads of households. All these gaps indicate the value of revisiting conventional approaches to social change and impact.
Advancing nutrition through African mass markets
Although ignored by scientists and nutritionists as an avenue for getting nutrition messages to communities, African mass markets are demonstrating that they can do a better job.
A number of African governments have been working with Harvest Plus for decades to promote Vitamin A Orange-fleshed sweet potato. However, adoption has been lukewarm due to the use of the methods mentioned above. To try and correct the situation, in Zimbabwe, Harvest Plus has partnered eMKambo to use the mass market in promoting Vitamin A Orange sweet potato among the majority of consumers who access their food through Mbare and other mass markets. The process also seeks to accelerate adoption by demystifying nutrition.
The power of appropriate language and understanding market dynamics
Vitamin A sweet potato is coming into an ecosystem where it is competing with other sweet potato varieties and other foods.
In a dynamic market ecosystem like African mass markets, the language has to change from talking about nutrition to wellness. When nutritionists talk in terms of carbohydrates, starch, beta-carotene, fats, vitamin A and other nutritional terminologies, they lose a lot of consumers.
Agronomists, breeders and nutritionists can give sweet potato varieties names like Alisha and Birigard, but as part of socialisation designed to delight customers, farmers and traders give those varieties new names. Some of the local names that have been given to sweet potato varieties include Muzvareshonga, Ngoro nhatu, Musafari, Bhasikiti, Chirikadzi, Kanyimo, Mai Chengetai, Kazangarare and many others. The name Muzvareshonga could stem from the fact that the variety was brought into the community by an enterprising woman affectionately known as Muzvareshonga. Ngoro nhatu implies that when properly grown, the variety can fill three scotch-carts from a single line or row.
Instead of nutritionists talking about vitamins in food, the best way of accelerating adoption is to talk about the health and wellness within food, like Vitamin A Orange sweet potato. It may just be enough for consumers to know that Vitamin A is essential for many processes in their bodies, including maintaining healthy vision, ensuring the normal function of organs and the immune system, as well as aiding the proper development of babies in the womb.
More than 4 000 farmers are now growing Vitamin A sweet potato with support from Harvest Plus and government extension officers in Mashonaland Central districts like Guruve, Mazowe and Mt Darwin.
Many of the farmers have also become breeders and multipliers of Vitamin A Orange sweet potato varieties. The relationship between Harvest Plus and eMKambo (Knowledge Transfer Africa Pvt Ltd) has focused on completing the loop by connecting farmers with sweet potato traders who are good at promoting sweet potato to diverse consumers. By regularly interfacing with diverse consumers, sweet potato traders have mastered market preferences. For instance, they now know that the majority of consumers prefer small to medium-size tubers that are easy to pack in a container and even sell. To produce tubers that are preferred by the mass market, farmers have to reduce inter-row spacing from 30cm to 15cm.
Feedback from the mass market shows that besides breeding for nutrition, sweet potato breeders should breed for taste, size, firmness. Breeding for yield and nutrition is not enough. The mass market also shows farmers the performance of other tubers like Irish potato, cassava, magogoya and madhumbe as well as levels of competition from pumpkins and butternuts. This compels farmers to know about substitutes and complements to sweet potatoes among consumers. Farmers, who don’t frequent the mass market, have no idea about some of these issues. As part of cultivating organised marketing of sweet potatoes, eMKambo has assisted traders to form a sweet potato traders association comprising traders who specialise in sweet potato trading. Traders in the association are being packaged into resilient entrepreneurs who can work with farmers fairly.
Sweet potato directing income to farmers and community-led nutrition
The fact that many communities are moving from cotton and tobacco to sweet potato implies that sweet potato is poised to direct community-led nutrition and values of a strong farmer economy.
This can be enhanced through protecting sweet potato food supply corridors right from the source to the market. Given the difficulties of trying to protect a commodity when it is already on the market, the partnership between eMKambo and Harvest Plus is ensuring branding of Vitamin A Orange sweet potato supplies starts at source (in production areas) to avoid cases where middlemen and other markets take advantage of the absence of branding at source to “steal” commodities and give them their labels. When sweet potatoes from Guruve or Mt Darwin are packaged and labelled with a corporate supermarket’ logo, the commodity is de-linked from the producers who should be the ones owning the brand. Maintaining and protecting the brand at source ensures originality, which will convince consumers that the commodity is indeed pure Vitamin A and free from impurities.
Harnessing the persuasive power of local stories and the grapevine
How stories about food and nutrition are built, shared and felt is becoming more important in addressing malnutrition than facts and figures. Creative storytelling weaved with street wisdom and local heroes like Muzareshonga can help farmers, traders, consumers and leaders to think differently about the role of sweet potato in advancing health and wellness. Due to information overload, many people are now swayed more by the narratives they believe than by raw data and that is why storytelling is no longer optional but an essential skill for nutritionists, scientists and policy-makers.
Scientists who dismiss a story as a soft skill, miss the persuasive power of a good story. At its core, great storytelling makes complex issues like nutrition and science simple without diluting the content and meaning. Stories aim to reveal the authentic human side based on lessons learned from wins and losses, best practices shaped on the market and in community interactions, as well as from everyday decision-making. Stories don’t just explain what happened, they reveal why it worked. When captured intentionally, stories become blueprints for repeatable success and catalysts for continuous learning on the role of food in nurturing a nutrition-secure society.
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