Title : The dietary situation in local families in the project site focusing on creating a sustainable nutritional system utilizing Moringa in rural Sierra Leone
Abstract:
As part of efforts to improve children's nutrition in low- and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization and other organizations recommend using moringa, whose leaves are rich in micronutrients. However, introducing new foods and incorporating them into regular diets is challenging in areas without a tradition of using them in meals. This study aimed to assess families' dietary situation in rural Sierra Leone, where a project to improve child nutrition through moringa has been introduced. The project, launched in 2019, was supported by a Japanese NPO in cooperation with local NGO to create a sustainable system for improving children's nutritional status. This includes establishing moringa school gardens and using moringa from these gardens in school lunch. It is also expected to improve the nutritional status of students’ families and their communities through the schools. In September 2023, a semi-structured questionnaire survey was conducted among 120 guardians of primary school students in Kambia district, Sierra Leone, where schools had introduced a moringa garden project. Dietary data was analysed based on the food group classification of the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W). Qualitative data, recorded as remarks in the questionnaire, was incorporated into discussing the results. The majority of the subjects had meals twice a day (72.5%), while about one-fourth of the subjects had only one meal per day (23.3%). The median (Q1, Q3) of the MDD score was 4 (3, 4). All the subjects had consumed some type of staple food the day before the survey. Also, 94.2% consumed animal-source food, 85.8% consumed green leafy vegetables, and only 5.0% had eaten moringa. On the other hand, 78.3% of the subjects reported that they ate moringa at home. The most common ways of using moringa were adding it to sauces or stews (55.0%) and brewing it as tea (50.0%). The majority (67.0%) used moringa once a week. In addition, 43.3% of the subjects received information about moringa from the mothers' support groups, and the most commonly received types of information were related to nutrition (71.1%) and cooking methods (55.8%). The results of the dietary survey indicate lower dietary diversity in the project area. The current study could not measure the amount of food consumed, so there is a needed to assess both quantity and quality (diversity) of their diet. On the other hand, the current study identified a new custom of moringa use in the study area where the people did not have the custom of eating moringa leaves other than using them as tea leaves to treat malaria. It was also found that only a few people ate moringa leaves in the one-day dietary survey. Further efforts are required to increase the frequency of eating moringa leaves in the study area.
