Community adequate nutrition (balanced diet) is very important during all the stages of life, as a healthy life cannot be sustained without adequate balanced diet. Deficiency diseases (Kwashiorkor) caused by micro nutritive is one of the serious problems amongst many communities in Zimbabwe. Nutritional deficiency is most prevalent in rural areas where the habitual diet lacks variety and most people do not afford to diversify their diets and are unable to include the necessary fruits and vegetables in their diet. The sustainable solution to their problem lies in the improvement and diversification of household diet by growing community nutrition garden and having the necessary knowledge and skills distributed through the lead farmer approach in the 3 wards of operation i.e. ward 10,11 and 12 in Kariba district.
The main objective of these nutrition gardens is to promote production of good nutritional vegetables to the family members as this has been very hard to attain such vegetables in many families. More so, households will be able to sell excess produces so as to buy other household requirement. Nutrition gardens enables availability of all types of vegetables in the community. Previously, communities had small individual gardens around the water point but had limited knowledge on nutritional gardening and farming as a business. The advent of the BHA project came in at the rightful moment to provide standard fencing, necessary knowledge through good agriculture practice and healthy harvest trainings. A team of 50 lead-farmers were capacitated with knowledge and skills to further train their colleagues on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). These low input gardens are meant to increase food diversity in the diets of the participating families and reduce reliance on the market for introduced vegetables and fruits. Documented by Brian Mukamuri.
