Sprinkles

Sunday, Oct. 3

We are in Kigali again today because Sung Kyu had a booth at an agriculture exhibition to present his compost tumbler machine. It’s a project idea that he came up with when he discovered that the use of organic fertilizer in Rwanda is very low. This week he built a big (6 ft x 3ft diameter) metal cylinder that can hold up to 1 tonne of organic material. It has two doors on it so you put food scraps or foliage into one door and give it a few spins everyday and in about 2 weeks you should have soil coming out of the second door. INATEK gave him a budget for the machine, and in the next few months some students will conduct research to see how successful it is.

I have some time before getting the bus back to Kibungo so I thought I would give more details about the Sprinkles project. Sprinkles is the brand name of a micronutrient powder that a Canadian, Carl Zlotkin, invented about 10 years ago. It’s meant to be a short term intervention to alleviate micronutrient deficiencies in children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. It comes in a little package that mothers put into their child’s food (such as porridge) once a day. It contains many micronutrients, but one of the main ones of concern in Rwanda is iron. In previous studies, children that received Sprinkles once a day for 2 months remained anaemia-free for the following 7 months. This intervention has been found to be successful in many countries and there is a big interest to bring Sprinkles to Rwanda. So how do we fit in? Well, Judy has been involved with the discussions about this intervention in Rwanda, and the previous team in May asks several questions about the willingness of mothers to use Sprinkles during their survey. One such question was concerning the packaging design. In the past, Sprinkles implementation has failed because the child depicted on the package had big rosy cheeks and the mothers took this for measles and wouldn’t use it (however, the very same packaging was used in another country and was very successful). In May there was a girl working on the project that works on design for social change, and she created several different package designs to see which one the mother’s liked the most. So we already have some data concerning Sprinkles and it will be our job to conduct more formative research (in the form of focus groups with mothers, fathers and other caregivers, as well as key informant interviews with health workers) to gather data on what the current infant and young child feeding practices are, how Sprinkles should be distributed and advertised, and what potential obstacles might be.

The main partners in this project will most likely be UNICEF and World Vision. We aren’t involved in that side of things and I’m not really sure if anything formal has been decided. But as far as we know UNICEF will be using World Vision to run a pilot study because World Vision has offices all over Rwanda. We will be doing research in 4 different areas so we will probably have to spend a few days overnight in some places. World Vision will most likely be able to cover these costs. We have a contact (a former UBC student) who has been using a certain methodology to conduct her focus groups with women in Rwanda. It is called Participatory Action Research and the idea is that the researcher isn’t just extracting information from people because they will be learning something during the focus group as well. I don’t know much about it yet but we will be getting together with her to learn how to conduct these focus groups.

That might have been kind of boring… I will post again soon. We’ve been really busy this week meeting up with the students that we will be working with!