Hello everybody! I'm Dr. Maria Elisa Christie. I'm the Director of Women and Gender in International
Development at the Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED), at
Virginia Tech. Welcome to our virtual Women and Gender in International Development
Discussion series. We are so happy that you could all join us. Please note that our event
is being recorded and will be available on our website later. You can turn off your camera if
you don't want your image to be recorded and by staying on you are consenting to being recorded,
but again you can turn off your camera and your image won't be there. So before introducing
our speaker I would like to read the following land and labor acknowledgement
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So the full calendar and any updates for this year's Women and Gender Development Discussion
Series can be seen on our website I think. uh Maybe you can put in the chat the website.
So some housekeeping uh this discussion will last approximately 40 minutes.
Our speaker's presentation will last around 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of discussion
and Q&A. All dial-in participants will be muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption.
You're welcome to post any question you would like in the chat box and you can post them at any time
and I will read them to our speaker at the end of a presentation.
If we have time and there are more questions after those in the chat people can raise their
hand in the webinar control and we will unmute you so that you can ask Dr. Colverson a question
or make your comment directly after the end of the session. Towards the end of the session
in order for our discussion to be as rich as it can be we need everyone to be respectful
and to treat all participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory behavior.
As I said the webinar is being recorded and you will have access to it via our website.
At the end we will be sending a link to a survey and please do answer it as it is
very important for us to get our feedback and then if you could tweet us those of you who
are on twitter by tagging us at wgd_vt so somebody could put that in the chat .
Now I'm going to introduce our speaker Dr. Kathy Colverson is an Associate Research Scientist
with the University of Florida's Animal Science Department and Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences, IFAS. Dr. Colverson also serves as Senior Gender Specialist
Gender Specialist for the USAID funded Feed the Future Innovation Lab for livestock systems
and has over 30 years of experience with gender analysis assessments publications and evaluations
in East Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
In addition, she has over 25 years of experience working with small and limited resource farmers
and communities to create sustainable practices in production marketing food safety and gender
equitable project planning with an emphasis on livestock production and value chain development.
Currently she is also a Co-PI on an ongoing DFID- IDRC funded agricultural research for development
program called "Advancing women's participation in livestock vaccine value chains in Nepal, Senegal
and Uganda". And the title of her talk today is engaging men in supporting maternal and
child consumption of milk and other animal source foods in Rwanda. Please welcome Dr. Kathy Colverson!
Thank you very much Maria Elisa, that's a lovely introduction. I'm going to go ahead and
start screen sharing here but delighted to have everybody join us today.
All right hopefully everyone can see that
Is that visible for everyone? okay very good. Thank you well for those of you folks who may not
have uh seen this type of illustration in the past. Let me see if I can get this a little bit larger, I
think hopefully that will work. This is actually a graphic illustration of a value chain and for
those of you who may never have really discussed or decided what a value chain is in the past this
is what it looks like if it's actually been drawn and a value chain is anything from the production
all the way to the consumption of an animal source food product or a crop or anything that
is associated with an agricultural commodity but I just thought this was a particularly illustrative
picture of what an African dairy value chain looks like as we will be discussing this in
today's presentation. So I'm delighted to be here and as Maria Elisa has said
I will be talking about engaging men in supporting maternal and child consumption of milk and other
animal source foods in Rwanda. I've been doing quite a bit of work in Rwanda associated with
the USAID funded livestock systems innovation lab where I'm the senior gender scientist and we've
been having a lot of fun with that uh the project work that we're doing there but I'm going to talk
particularly about one that has had a great deal of impact on women and children in Rwanda.
All right let me see if I can get this to behave itself here all right okay we'll get this from
the beginning here the project background I'm going to be talking about is really based on the
needs that we decided and determined through some initial research through a much larger
livestock innovation lab funded project and it really looked at what are the issues around
maternal and child nutrition specifically as they relate to the dairy value chain in Rwanda
so many of you will be aware of the fact when we think about gender issues we're talking
about not only women but about men and boys and young girls and so when we think about issues
associated with nutrition particularly maternal and child nutrition practices
we need to understand that for most countries in the world particularly low and middle
income this is considered the sole responsibility of women. So again when you think about household
nutrition when we think about feeding children it's predominantly women that we are considering
but something to be aware of is that men can actually influence the nutrition in their
household not only if they're involved in joint decision making and we're going to talk about
decision making later because this is very important but also control of resources such
as the income that's generated from animals food products as well as the actual products themselves
the meat the milk the eggs that are generated from the livestock but they can also be a form of
social support for their wives and their daughters who are involved in the dairy value chain
but despite the roles and the importance of men in influencing nutrition it's important to recognize
that most governments and most extension and non-profit organizations that work particularly
in Rwanda target women because the men are not comfortable in participating in these programs as
they perceive it to be a woman's role. So there's very little evidence really that has been found on
ways to more effectively involve men in maternal and child nutrition particularly because of their
role in influencing how the products are consumed or sold so this project was created specifically
to look at ways that we could create strategies to more effectively engage men in household nutrition
as in all international development projects there's usually a large interdisciplinary
team involved and Dr. Emily Ouma who is an aggregate agricultural economist associated
with the International Livestock Research Institute is based in Uganda but works very
frequently in Rwanda and she basically led the charge on this project Dr. Valerie Flax who's a
nutritionist and is based in North Carolina worked with us along with a very excellent non-profit
organization called Three Stones International with Jesse and Mary-Ann who are based in Kigali
and we're our in-country coordinators as well as our in-country staff and then of course I
was involved as well as Dr. Alessandra Galie who is a gender scientist associated with ILRI
and is based in Nairobi, Kenya. So a little bit more on this project to understand why
this was important and the kinds of things that that we did in the strategies that we created.
We basically were interested in developing, implementing and evaluating an intervention
that would be involved in helping men to engage more actively in maternal and child nutrition
particularly around milk and animal source food consumption and specifically around milk
and this project is part of a much larger livestock systems innovation lab funded project
calling enhancing milk quality and consumption for improved income and nutrition in Rwanda
that Dr. Emily Ouma also head up as the primary investigator and the link to that project is
here because there are a number of different reports and project briefs that are associated
with that project that you can review at your own leisure and this project was involved in targeting
women with young children in households that have received a cow usually a holstein through
the government of Rwanda's one cow per poor family program which is also known as the Girinka program.
This program was created after the genocide about 25 years ago and um the product actually
the project was created about 15 years ago but the genocide occurred about 25 years ago because
many of the cows that were in the country were slaughtered during the genocide as were many of
the men associated with those that were involved in in living in Rwanda. Very horrible time but the
government was trying to make amends by helping to improve the nutrition through giving a cow to
the poor families that it identified in Rwanda. The interesting to understand about this program and
I've actually done some work specifically on this at looking at the Girinka program from a
gender lens and if you are interested there are references at the end of this presentation that
will direct you to the papers that I've written on this is that the program did have many benefits
particularly associated with community cohesion by bringing together people that had not been brought
together in the past as well as in improving actually income within the household and there was
an indication that household nutrition had been improved. However, the actual direct measurements
of this improvement in nutrition had never been measured so we were very interested in looking
at what the government said and what actually had happened particularly associated with women and
young children. So the initial project that Ii mentioned previously this larger project
decided to focus not only on looking at the consumption of household produced milk but to work
with the families through the government using community health workers to provide training as
well as collect documentation on how the milk that was being produced through the Girinka program was
being used and I'll just give you a spoiler alert most of it was sold, it was not consumed.
So a little bit more in the project background particularly from a gender perspective.
I mentioned that the community health workers were involved in providing training
which again predominantly was targeting women and obviously young children but we were interested in
finding ways to get the men more involved in this because it's really important to
consider the overall household nutrition and not just the nutrition specifically of the
women. But the problem we had was that men really participate in the meetings due to the fact that
they believe that the meetings and anything to do with household nutrition is primarily
the domain of women. So they don't consider it appropriate to participate and also the places
where the trainings were taking place mainly health centers and community nutrition sites
are largely viewed as female spaces. So this is something to consider if you're going to
be doing training in the future and you wish to engage both men and women you need to think
very carefully about location particularly how is that location perceived from a gender perspective.
However as we mentioned previously the men can influence nutrition within the household through
the decisions that are being made because in most households particularly Rwanda, particularly
in poor rural areas the men are the predominant decision makers and they can make decisions about
how and why the plants are livestock are raised, how they are managed and how to use the income
that is generated from the sale of those products and this is really important again as I say
mentioning the Girinka program because of the fact that the milk that was produced from this program
ended up primarily being sold rather than consumed within the household.
So project activities associated with a specific project included we wanted to conduct formative
research by doing separate focus group discussions with men and women key informant interviews and
then participatory workshops that looked at issues related to gender and nutrition. We also
wanted to do research specifically associated with assessing men and women's perceptions
of their roles in nutrition and the gender, the gender dynamics that affect their roles within
the household. We were also interested in looking at ways that we can assess men's preferences
on ways they would like to be engaged in maternal and child nutrition as well as women's preferences
on how they would like the men to be engaged this was the fascinating part as far as I'm
concerned of the research because they both had very different perceptions of each other.
So activities continuing we basically use this research intervene
information to develop an intervention which included developing a training of trainers package
which I did, and then I actually had to deliver via zoom because of the COVID restrictions.
uh it was actually quite successful and and entertaining to do that as as well
and that's available also on our website for the livestock systems innovation lab.
We then wanted to track the participation among the men who were trained in this cohort as well
as the work that they did with husbands and sons in the communities afterwards by doing structured
observations of the way they used the training materials and then we wanted to conduct a mixed
methods evaluation of the intervention and collect data on the knowledge attitudes and practices
related to maternal and child nutrition specifically around milk and animal source
food consumption so we did a pre and post assessment of all the trainings and then
had structured observations of the men that were using these training materials afterwards
to see how effective they were. So preliminary results of the surveys that we did showed a lot of
interesting things, number one obviously both men and women are involved in household food security
but as we mentioned previously their roles differ significantly and we are writing up all
the details associated with the research on this which will also be made available in the livestock
systems innovation lab website. Men generally provide money to purchase animal source foods
and fruits whereas women prepare the foods and supplement the diets with vegetables,
chickens and eggs, roots and tubers and for those of you who have worked uh anywhere in Africa and
particularly actually anywhere in the world you understand that women and children usually
have more responsibility for smaller livestock such as chickens which is why they can actually
control some of the income associated with the production of both the meat and the eggs. We also
were involved with working with the community health workers as I mentioned previously in
government employees who provided training on child nutrition in the balanced diets to the women
they also are the ones that are providing these cows for the Girinka program
to increase consumption of animal source food. So it's very important to have them involved
in the qualitative surveys and the results. Some of the interesting things that came out of these
surveys and I mentioned previously is what do women want men to know about nutrition and how
can they be helpful in the household when it comes to household nutrition. Number one, the women were
interested that men should actually be trained by professional nutritionists or village elders who
have been trained by the community health workers about how to prepare balanced meals for children.
They are also interested in having the men being trained on the importance of milk consumption
for children in the household instead of automatically selling the milk for income
because we can't be guaranteed that the income that is being generated is going to be used on
household nutrition. The other thing they were really interested in and I thought this was
fascinating because I'm involved in a couple of food safety projects in Ethiopia where we are
looking at food hygiene and particularly food pathogens and food-borne diseases
is that men should be trained on milk hygiene and safe handling of dairy products
especially the dangers of raw milk due to lack of pasteurization and what I have seen
in different countries associated with raw milk is that basically when the milking takes place
it's usually the woman that does the milking. She may or may not clean the animal's udder prior to
milking, she may or may not attempt to pasteurize the milk and if she does attempt to boil the milk
there is no thermometer gauge and there is no timing as far as how long the milk boiling
takes place so there's no indication whether or not the foodborne pathogens that are associated
with uh the raw milk that is being consumed have been destroyed. So this is a really big big issue.
We also looked at the most effective places and methods of sharing nutrition information with the
men and this was looking at things like media such as newspapers, radio messages, posters and
sms messages through their cell phones we looked at different locations that weren't perceived as
exclusively women domains such as churches, market centers and and cooperatives particularly farming
cooperatives, and they also were interested in the fact that women can transmit information better
than the community health workers if they are trained well. So we're actually considering now
whether or not we should create training for the women specifically around nutrition to educate
their husbands that's going to be another whole discussion at some point. We're also obviously
always looking at ways that we can train men and women together and considering some of these other
items that I've just mentioned those are important to to factor into the equation so following the
survey results we did a variety of different things after we got the information that I just
presented, I created a series of virtual workshops on strategies to engage men in household nutrition
and trained both three stones international and the ILRI partners. Again this was a virtual
workshop so these materials are available on our livestock systems innovation lab website.
Then three stones international took the information from this workshop and the materials
and basically nuanced it to be able to turn it into stuff that would be useful for the local
facilitators and translated the final messages into Kenya, Rwanda so they could actually use
this out in the field very appropriately. They then took the the facilitators that were trained and uh
did training in two different districts with a variety of different community environmental
health officers, 21 model fathers along with two additional district representatives in each one of
these these districts in Rwanda. The participants that were involved in these trainings did a
pre and post knowledge assessment and in general they learned quite a lot about nutrition
but the issue that we discovered is that they did not get enough information on safe handling of
milk products and so obviously when we go back and consider revising the training materials
in the future this is something we're going to be looking at. I mentioned that we did do a variety of
different things with model father facilitators who then went out into the communities
and they conducted an activity to reach these intervention fathers and community members using
key messages and some of this was done through SMS messaging on cell phones. I'm just going to
give you some quick numbers here. We were able to reach 224 men and 38 women with the CEHO uh the
community health uh workers and the model fathers and in Nyabihu, we reached 370 men and 210 women
and we delivered one key message weekly by SMS to each of the intervention fathers to follow up
on the training that they had received. Overall the facilitators in these different regions and
I'll put this up, receive fairly high ratings on their information related to nutrition,
their facilitation skills and their attitudes but as you see when we get into technical information
particularly around milk safe handling practices they were rated fairly low. So we're going to
have to go back and revisit our training materials specifically around these areas because then that
was not a high area of focus and obviously that was important particularly to the women.
So obviously we had some challenges throughout this entire project.
We have had to receive a project extension because of the coveted restrictions that we had throughout
the entire project. We had difficulty obviously accessing the the villages and the communities we
were going to work in accessing the people we were going to be collecting initial survey data from
but we've been able to do it slowly but surely and conduct the visits that we wanted to and
we have continued to provide the SMS messages on a weekly basis and we also have a telephone
hotline that remains open particularly for the people that we trained and for the intervention
fathers as well. So I'm going to post a couple of other little items that are available for you.
There was a video that was created specifically for talking about the the training that took
place from the three stones international facilitators to the intervention fathers in
the different villages and that's available on YouTube and as I mentioned previously we also
have uh more reports and information available on the livestock systems innovation lab website
particularly associated with the larger project and if you're really interested in the papers
that I wrote on looking at the Girinka project from a gender lens you can find that link at
the very bottom of the page and I think that's all I have to say. So happy to take questions
okay
Okay so um let's see we have a couple of questions
I think we need to somehow mute there's noise coming in I don't know if we can mute the people
um or I mean ask anybody to mute themselves that is not muted um because we're getting
some interference. Okay well let's see let me start with a question from uh Dr. Larry Vaughn here at
Virginia Tech. He says was there consideration of teaching both boys and girls about
nutrition in school so that they will have this knowledge when they become fathers and mothers?
That is an excellent question and I wish we would have had the funds to do something like that
because we have had discussions about that associated with other projects in the past
and I actually have been involved in previous projects where we have done that where we've
actually worked in schools particularly to train young children about nutrition and some of the
concerns that they might have around balancing nutrition in their households but I'm afraid
on this project we didn't have the funds or the or
the time available to do that but a great great suggestion for the future.
Okay let's see so um just want to say um Lumbini, could you look up the did you see Maggie wrote the
question about um what is the link of your gender training package? maybe if you could go to the
to the um or Daniel if you can go to the innovation labs page and look for that
Okay it should be listed hopefully under the the last
um link on that last slide I presented that specifically looks at what we call our
gender and youth page so hopefully if you click on that link that should be able to bring it up
and if it's not posted at this point it's probably because our communications person
has been overwhelmed but I will double check and make sure it gets posted okay um
let's see um all right so Daniel you had a question. First of all I say thank you for your great
presentation. uh for those model fathers trained by three stones how do you think their status
with other men changed after the intervention? What did other men in the community think about their
messages and model behaviors? That is a superb question I'd love that um I don't know to be
honest with you if they have followed up on that but I think that they probably will be because I
know three stones international is very interested in how they can scale up this training to larger
numbers of model fathers but I will specifically mention that to them um as I say I'm sure that
they're going to do this but I know that Rwanda is still having massive amounts of restrictions
associated with COVID, but I think that's an excellent excellent suggestion for a follow-up.
Okay I'm gonna combine, I had two questions and and I'd like to encourage people to put some more
questions in the chat because um this is the last question that I have but so I'm interested in uh
the experience of reaching people despite covid using these alternative methods like SMS and you
know different information communication technologies now we usually are like
trying to get more women involved because there are less women involved in this case you're
trying to get more men involved so things are different but I'm wondering if you've reflected on
you know how does this use of information and communication technologies um what are the pros
and cons or what are the you know have you thought about you know how does it increase participation
or decrease participation of men and women specifically because of that kind of approach?
That's an excellent question and I've been thinking about this not only just related to
this project but also related to everything we've been doing over the past two years
is that are we seeing increased numbers of people being able to attend different functions because
they are on zoom and on internet and in some instances yes I would say that is indeed the case.
The biggest challenge that we are facing um is associated with internet connectivity and many
of the places that we're working are extremely rural and unless we can bring people into places
where they have good internet connectivity to be able to do these uh workshops and these seminars
and these trainings that we're trying to do it's really challenging and COVID obviously
has made that much more difficult because we are only allowed to have a certain number of people
together in a room. I can't remember what the exact number is but it varies depending on the
organization that we're working with and obviously they have to wear masks etc etc um so in some
instances yes I would say we're seeing increased numbers of attendance from both men and women.
It depends on again where the location is that they're able to access internet
but um I think in the future as we move forward I think there's going to be greater
use of this technology because it reduces the cost tremendously for uh having to bring
people together and you know face-to-face workshops but of course we lose um some of
the the value obviously of face-to-face as well but I think in the future we're going
to see a great deal more of this is my sense and I don't know what your experience has been
Maria Elisa but um I think uh just thinking about the CG gender platform meeting for those of us who
attended that last week I was in shock how many people had registered because I've done a couple
of face-to-face conferences with them in the past where we maybe get if we're lucky a hundred maybe
150 people show up face to face they had 1100 people registered as participants so that just
shows you that there was a tremendous amount of interest and availability using this technology
I'll come back to that when we get to discussion but I'd like to read Maggie's um
question she asked will the gender training Maggie Zen ask will the gender training materials be used
by and shared with local organizations and other organizations in the country
and the region after your project ends. Absolutely, well three stones international has already taken
it and run with it and they are a local non-profit organization based in Kigali and um I am sure that
ILRI, the international livestock research institute which has a very strong presence
in Rwanda will be using them as well because they were very interested in ways to engage
men more actively in household nutrition so I think we will definitely be using them
certainly in Rwanda with the partners that we have been working with but I have a suspicion
that we may take these and adapt them to other locations that the livestock systems innovation
lab is working with as well and we work a lot with not only universities but also government
as well as nonprofit organizations in about half a dozen different countries.
Okay here's another question that I want to be able to come back to in discussion but Ali Wilson
wrote what are more examples of spaces to have meetings or trainings that are not considered
female oriented that might bring in more public turnout? That's an excellent question because
you know I'm just thinking about the trainings I've done in the past where I frequently will
use schools but again that's often considered to be a female space because of women's involvement
with their children's education. Churches are a little bit more neutral because usually men and
women will go to churches as we mentioned in this slide presentation. Cooperatives
particularly associated if we're looking at male farming cooperatives which you know usually is is
where you're going to find a lot of men but one of the things I've been talking to Dr. Emily um about
is where do men go? They go to bars and we're actually considering kind of an innovative way of
thinking about maybe creating some posters or some messages that we could target men where they go.
So that hasn't been tried yet but I think we're going to start looking at some innovative
methodologies because certainly if you if you're trying to find gender-neutral spaces
that is challenging in some of the areas that we're working in but I would say
you know schools maybe but definitely churches, cooperatives um possibly uh community buildings
within the the villages uh it's just really thinking carefully about what
might be considered to be a gender-neutral space where both men and women feel comfortable going.
Let's see do we have any more questions or shall we
Oh here's a question. Okay this question from Daniel um Kathy could you elaborate on the
work you did with the Girinka team to reflect upon their own perspectives of gender norms
and attitudes before working to shift attitudes with livestock razors in Rwanda? oh that's a
great question Daniel. Well let me tell you right now that that was a rather interesting project
and the reason I say this is because the initial paper that came out on that the government of
Rwanda refused to allow me to publish it and that was due to the fact they didn't like the numbers
and so it took me about a year but I had to go back and forth and massage the numbers
and use their statistics before they would allow us to publish the paper
we have subsequently you know presented that information that's been published in a journal
and we've presented both the government as well as the USAID mission in Rwanda but
it's an interesting thought to think about when you're doing research in other
countries what is the process to actually get the information released that hasn't been manipulated
and for those of you who are publishing using uh other countries statistics we had it was a very
strong learning experience for us in the livestock lab and we have subsequently
discovered that other countries that we're working in have some of the same restrictions
that you need to actually make sure that your your initial draft of your paper goes through
the government officials first before it's allowed to be published so that's all I can say is that we
we released the information, it was presented to the government, we got the publication out.
I would say they recognize that there are issues associated with the fact that the
milk is being sold rather than consumed and they are making efforts to try and change
that and they're very interested actually in the way that Emily Ouma's project has
unfolded and the possibilities of actually trying to increase household milk consumption.
So I hope that answered your question Daniel.
Okay we have two more questions here. One from Elizabeth Dennis. She says you mentioned that some
wives had proven to be more effective at teaching the material. Is there a little apathy or other
perception challenge due to potentially perceived outsiders presenting to workshops? Will any of the
men be trained to present the information to other men? Well currently there are men that are
being trained that are trained they're um what we call the the intervention fathers and they
are the ones that are training community fathers at this point um and again the desire is to scale
this project up to affect many more communities than we currently have but why do they prefer to
have their wives, I think it's probably because it's the information that's being presented is
more nuanced to the household uh I don't know that specifically but that's what I'm assuming
um what's fascinating is I had somebody bring this up um on another conversation I had about
this idea of actually creating training materials or training uh specifically for the wives and how
they could then relay this information to their husbands if that's a more effective mechanism for
getting the husbands to participate in household nutrition. So that's something we're going to
consider in the future but I think it's probably because they say the wives take
the information that they've learned and they nuance it more specifically to their household.
Let's see, I have another one from Maggie. um Can you provide more details how model father
works? how model fathers work in this project? It seems a very effective way to encourage men to
engage and participate and change gender norms as men can influence each other's behaviors. What
can be learned for adapting to other countries contexts? no I'd say that's an excellent question
as I mentioned I think at the beginning of the presentation there isn't a lot of
material out there on ways of engaging men and boys particularly in household nutrition there
are other uh programs and particularly thinking about reproductive health that have looked at
ways to engage men and boys more actively in that particular arena and um I think we're going
to start actually trying to adopt some of the practices that have been used that are effective
in particularly reproductive health but um the idea of getting men to um you know to to step
up and to actually be viewed as something that is valuable as opposed to being viewed by their peers
as somebody who is is weak is really um is really important and again looking at ways to do this
that will encourage them and that will allow them to um feel supported by their peers as opposed
to being ridiculed is something that we're we're definitely looking at because that's going to be
an issue that we're going to face across all the countries that we work in but again if you want to
um again if I haven't uh yet mentioned please take a look at our links on the livestock systems
innovation lab because we will be posting all the materials from this project since we basically
got an extension until the end of last month and so they're writing up all the reports this month.
Okay I'm going to read Lumbini's note there because I think uh well I'd love to ask you
a lot of more things about gendered space. My favorite thing and the ICT, I want to read here
what Lumbini wrote so you can use the raise your hand feature to ask any question directly. We can
help unmute you so we can I think go on to more conversation if anybody would like to speak so
Lumbini do you do you can you say where the raise your hand I'm looking for it myself.
Is it under reactions? Yes it's under reactions yeah yeah so here I'm gonna
I'm gonna show you. There! I am raising my hand but um and I even changed the color of my hand
yesterday I was playing with this feature, I didn't like that the yellow hand. So interesting you can
change they have several skin tones but um so I'll let I'll let uh anybody else want to speak up
anybody else contribute any projects that they're on that they'd like to talk about
related to this. Okay Daniel, go ahead you have the mic. Yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna be selfish and
and and ask my time. kathy I really I really appreciated that because this focus I think
come you mentioned the other conference recently the cultivating equality which brought together
researchers from across the CG centers from from in in the us and elsewhere this this theme of
moving I think still from theory to practice and engaging men so I think it's it's really
great to see these these target approaches are being utilized um I guess is there any
elaborate any more kind of negative um feedback that has come through from from men engaging with
this project or any kind of unintended that you've that that the Girinka team has had to
address and kind of develop messages or developing that the outreach training for the model farmers
that was addressed. Now that's an excellent question Daniel, at this point. I am not aware
of any but I also haven't been in country in Rwanda in a while um and I don't know
exactly if Emily's been in country or not but I have not heard anything along those lines. I mean
I've heard it from other projects in the past when we try to intervene in household nutrition
and I should put in a plug right now you guys for one other project that I was on
that was did a lot of work associated with integrating gender and nutrition into
agricultural systems it's called the ingenious project integrating gender and nutrition into
agricultural extension systems and i-n-g-e-n-a-e-s and i can send out the link to that as well
but we created a number of different uh exercises interactive participatory work associated with not
only integrating men more actively into household nutrition but also looking at ways that we can
kind of assess the power dynamics that are going on within a household when it comes to nutrition
and that's a whole other discussion um but uh and so that's that's that's another seminar but
definitely there um there can be blowback Daniel that's a that's a really good question it's really
important to understand the local context and even the household context to make sure that
you don't create those kinds of situations. I always say to people when I train them
the first thing is do no harm because that is always possible.
See if we have any others
Otherwise I may be selfish again Kathy. Can I ask you've kind of highlighted a lot of the great data
coming out of this project. Could you elaborate kind of in decision making kind of what good
questions other methods that you use like like qualitative or quantitative approaches that that
the research that you utilize during this this research now decision making in any household
is complicated it doesn't matter which country in the world you're in and particularly when it comes
to nutrition um particularly when it comes to animal source food products because animal source
food products are the most prized piece of consumption in a household be it meat, eggs, milk
whatever um and usually those those food items are reserved for the males and usually the oldest male
and then it goes down the food chain down until you usually get the the wife or the youngest
daughter at the end of the food chain who receives the least amount of food and the least quality of
food and again in in the ingenious project we have a number of different exercises that look
at this issue because we are very interested in helping men to understand. Number one, who needs
the high quality food and particularly associated with protein and number two what can they do
to change the dynamics within the household to provide the high quality protein and
animal source foods to usually associated with pregnant lactating women and young children
um so I guess again I'll put in the plug and I'll make sure that I send a link
for that project and all the materials we created so that people can have access to that
but it's a big complicated issue around decision making to decide particularly in a household
who gets the food and sometimes to be honest with you it's the woman who has more of the gender bias
than the man does because she believes that it's her role to feed the family and that it's her role
to make sure that the men folk who are out there doing the heavy labor get the majority of high
quality food even if that's not the case. So we also sometimes have to do a lot of gendered work
with the women not just the men when it comes to nutrition and household distribution of foodstuffs.
Okay so I'm a geographer and I love gendered space and in all the projects um
that I've been involved with I'm always you know paying attention to
you know how to use how to use gendered space and uh so so usually the problem has been in
agriculture projects that I've worked in the problem has been that there are fewer women
involved than men this maternal nutrition project and food is like more in women's area but um
I don't know that there's gender gender neutral spaces um I don't I don't think that that's I
wouldn't think that that's the strategy to pursue although I guess the only place that I have seen
what I could consider gender neutral spaces is working with the Mennonite central committee
in Bangladesh with their yard meetings approach with our IPM innovation lab where they had yard
meetings you know because they had a family approach. That's they they want men and women
and children involved and so that was kind of a semi-public space where women who would
normally not really have a lot of ability to to move in the public that yard and the
neighbors within their neighborhood within their community um that was kind of considered more of
a gender-neutral space that's the only one I can think of yeah I'm thinking with the peanut work
when I was PI for a peanut crisp before it was you know the collaborative research sport programs
we created these booklets that were actually peanut uh recipes and so it was targeting women
to get women involved but then when they had these little published books the peanut stories
from Kamuli uh I went back and asked people where they had shared the information they
they all carried their book around and the men and women shared in very different spaces and
one of the things was bars in fact men sharing in bars men were preachers and so they were sharing
to men and women that like you say churches were actually a mixed space but it was the men that
were sharing in those. um I was working with NAWO, the national association of women's organizations
in Uganda so the women leaders met with women only in in NAWO meetings throughout the country
um
And then in the Philippines we had a project where I saw that the invitations to participate in our
SANREM project were being delivered through a very gendered, very masculine space of the
town hall basically of the the government center where it was men that were getting the information
because they were the ones getting there where a space that I found that was interestingly used
by men and women and was a perfect place to put a poster was the basketball courts because the
women used it to dry the grains and to collect the grain so they would frequent that space
but the men used it to play basketball and so that was a community space that was alternatively
women's base and then a men's space. um so that's interesting yeah um your wonderful presentation
um I already said we're sharing a short survey so it also helps us bring funding to uh be able
to whether we bring speakers to campus or we which hopefully in the future we will so um
and then I want to let you know that our next event is in approximately a month on November
18th and that will be Dr. Mary Rodriguez from the Ohio State University. You can find
information on her on the website that was posted earlier and have a wonderful day and we hope
that you can join us for future events. So thank you again everybody thanks very much everyone.
It goes everyone excellent okay