Good Gardens, healthy children
Profound environmental changes are affecting the health status of Pacific Islanders, especially young
children. Paul Sommers describes how a child-centred approach to improving home food growing and the
home compound environment has led to better family health.
Paul Sommers
The once environmentally pristine Pacific Island countries are undergoing major transition. Modernisation
over the past few decades has created profound environmental changes, especially in the newly settled towns
and commercial farming areas. Pollution of air and water, soil erosion and reef destruction are occurring at
alarming rates. The links between environmental deterioration and poor health - evident in dengue fever,
malaria, diarrheal disease and respiratory infection, as well as injuries from uncovered garbage - is only now
becoming better understood at all levels.
One community's strategy
UNICEF's Pacific Programme, particularly the Family Food Production and Nutrition Project (FFPNP), is
designed to address these issues by promoting an environmentally friendly approach to improving home
food growing. It promotes techniques which build on the knowledge, skills and local resources available to
households. With this brief background, I will share with you one Pacific Island country's strategy of
promoting food production to improve the home environment and family health. Honiara is the capital city
of the Solomon Islands. In 1986 a survey by health workers confirmed what many residents already knew:
their food and health situation were deteriorating and it was affecting the survival and development of their
children. Families were having difficulty purchasing enough good-quality food. The Honiara Garden Club,
through the Solomon Island Government, requested assistance from FFPNP to set up a programme where
families could grow at least part of their daily food needs.
Discussing problems and potentials
A plan of action was agreed upon. The first part would be a rapid appraisal in order to understand the
problems and potentials for growing food in town. It revealed a number of opportunities for enhancing the
overall home environment through first improving the environment for food growing. These included
land use issues such as how to improve soil productivity, how to grow food in a permaculture-type manner
on hillsides as opposed to shifting cultivation, as well as how best to convert household-generated renewable
and nonrenewable materials into useful resources. After this assessment, the Club's plan was to organise a
series of meetings to discuss these problems with the entire community. Suggestions were formulated for
action that the households and the Club would undertake, working in partnership. The final step would be to
develop a plan of action with the community to carry out the suggested activities. A total of 5 meetings were
organised by the Honiara Garden Club, scheduled over a 5-day period so that those who wanted to
participate could find a convenient time to attend. Radio Solomon Islands, the only radio station in the
country, provided publicity for the event as their community contribution.
Growing food in new surroundings
The meetings were attended mostly by women, who are traditionally responsible for growing food in the
village. The discussions were lively and free-flowing. The women easily identified the main technical,
cultural and economic problems contributing to their food insecurity. They discussed among themselves
why the problems were occurring and what needed to be done. The women were basically saying, "we are
responsible for our family's food system and our worth to our society is partly judged on our ability to
produce sufficient food. In our clan-based village environment, we could choose the best lands and shift
cultivation when the land became unproductive. But the Honiara environment is totally different. Here we
live on very small lots with a dry climate and coral soil. We never would use this type of environment to
grow food back in the village." In other words, they had neither confidence nor experience with food
growing in this new environment. In addition, they had brought only a few food plants from their outer
island villages, when they came to settle in Honiara. They were unfamiliar with many of the foods sold in
the public market and the shops. To start rebuilding their confidence, the Club organised home garden tours
as part of the workshop, so the women could observe and talk with other women about how they developed
their food gardens. It quickly became evident that this strategy of "look and learn" was very effective in
helping the women realise that their limited land could indeed be productive.
Action for family health
With the successful completion of the meetings, the staff of the Club began to concentrate on the problems
associated with undernutrition in Honiara's children. The key message conveyed to households was: good
home food gardens will improve the physical home environment and help improve the health of your
children. The Garden Club staff, together with the Honiara Town Council's Medical Division, designed a
strategy for addressing the needs of households. They called this the Family Health Workshop Series. Each
workshop series ran for 6 months in communities which had been assessed as having high health risks. The
first phase was a 3-day intensive workshop with interested community members. The entire family was
encouraged to attend. However, for various reasons, women and children were the main participants. The
first day focused on the importance of good nutrition and health. The first task was to tailor the main
messages to the actual needs of the community. This was achieved through a process of assessment, analysis
and action (Triple A) with the community. The Triple A process helped the participants identify the main
causes which had an impact on their child's health status, and to suggest practical activities they could
undertake immediately to improve the physical environment in which their child lives.
Starting from the child's environment
The staff used a simple framework to facilitate the discussion. The group looked at their young child's
environment, starting from conception through pre-school. They started by discussing the risks that an
unborn infant faces at the prenatal stage, if the environment within the mother's womb is unhealthy. If the
mother is underweight due to poor-quality food and/or exposed to infection due to air pollution from poorly
ventilated cooking areas or unclean drinking water, the child is at risk of low birth weight. Once the child is
born, it faces a different set of environmental challenges. Exposure to the hostile physical environment,
coupled with inadequate food intake, will affect the child's ability to survive and develop. Items such as solid
waste can be breeding sites for mosquitoes and rodents as well as sites for potential injuries from rusted tins
and broken glass. Once the group identified these issues, they looked at why they were occurring and what
they could do about it.
Improving the environment
The group realised that many of the nutrition and health problems of their children could be addressed
through improving their home environment. A good place to start were sites where they grow food. The
second day therefore focused on the activities of the Honiara Garden Service Centre. The centre provided a
practical venue for discussing solutions to the nutrition and health problems identified the day before. The
group observed simple techniques to enhance their home environment by using resources available to them.
For example, the idea of burying organic refuse was an unfamiliar concept to most women, especially those
that had been farming in the villages. Before the workshop, most households would gather the refuse from
around their home compound and pile it for collection by the Honiara Town Council. According to council
figures, more than 75% of the refuse collected was organic. The garden club staff demonstrated how to bury
the organic material, thus improving the soil while at the same time reducing the breeding site for rodents
and mosquitoes. Another example was the use of non-renewable solid waste materials such as biscuit tins
and used tyres. Previously, these items were usually strewn around the home compound, causing accidents
and mosquito breeding sites when full of water. The garden centre demonstrated how these discarded
materials could be made into containers for growing food. Wet areas that used to serve as insect-breeding
grounds were planted with moisture-loving plants. The garden centre also demonstrated sloping-land
farming systems and the benefits of polyculture. The group was thus exposed to a variety of practical
techniques that the women could apply immediately upon returning home that day.
Growth monitoring
On the third and final day in the first phase of the Family Health Workshop Series, the importance of growth
monitoring was discussed. This was designed to encourage women to become more actively involved in
monitoring their child's growth. Women learned about the significance of a change in the direction of their
child's growth line and the action they need to take if growth is faltering. The second phase of the Family
Health Workshop series consisted of half-day sessions each month over a period of 4 months. Each session
focused on just one new-food growing technique and one new food recipe demonstration. Issues related to
nutrition and child health were also discussed. The child growth chart was used as the main entry point for
the discussions. The third and final phase in the Family Health Workshop Series was held during Month 6
and was designed to reinforce the topics previously covered during the previous phases.
Encouraging results
Activities undertaken by the staff of the Honiara Garden Club have increased food availability and food
security as well as improved the home environment. The club's activities came to be known as "sup-sup"
garden, a pidgin term meaning everything that goes into the soup (main meal). It has received praise as
perhaps the most popular community activity in the country's young history. A recently completed national
nutrition survey funded by UNICEF showed that, of those interviewed in Honiara, nearly 20% of the
households had started growing food in response to the project's activities. Improvement of existing gardens
has also been significant. Low income families estimate that, by growing food at home, they now save up to
20% of the money they used to spend at the market on fresh foods. The Honiara experience has
demonstrated that a process of working with the community, using a child-centered environmental
improvement approach and emphasizing home food production as a starting point, can be the beginning of a
process which will result in a sustainable healthy environment.
Paul Sommers
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