By Patrick Mutuo, Team Leader

Before the start of the project in 2004, the Sauri cluster was beset by a number of challenges. One of the most critical was food and nutritional insecurity. Poor food crops (mainly maize and beans) resulted in a period of hunger that lasted over three months per year and malnutrition among children was high. Without school meals, children were absent from classes so that they could perform menial jobs to earn some income to buy food. Disease burden was a big challenge to the community, especially malaria outbreaks, where almost half of the entire population would be infected at any given time. Water sources were far from the community, especially during dry seasons resulting in community members spending many hours to fetch water from contaminated sources. Despite a tarmac road to the cluster, the access roads into the villages and households were completely impassable, especially during the rainy seasons.

The development of intervention programs and priorities were based on these challenges. Food production was increased through agricultural inputs (such as fertilizer and seeds) to the farmers and later through credit schemes. This support was coupled with the introduction of high value crops to provide households with income and nutrition. School meals programs were also started in all schools by taking advantage of the agricultural produce surpluses. With investments in anti-malarial bed nets, immunizations against diseases such as measles, health education, HIV care, and by increasing health delivery points and services, a lot of the disease burden has been addressed to date. Water points have been protected and now provide greater access to water while programs to improve latrines at public institutions and households have also been put in place; resulted in improved sanitation. Over 100 km of rural access roads have been opened and improved upon to provide easier transport of goods and people.

With staple food needs almost met, there is still need to increase the scale of production of high value crops and to create institutions and capacity for “value-add” to attain maximum returns for household investments. These efforts could be complemented by community marketing organizations that would have links to the markets. School teachers and parents also need to be supported further to empower them to produce foodstuffs from school gardens to support the school meals program with minimum external support. The community, which is healthier than before, is not assured of continued health services provision in the future unless systems by the project and government ministries are put in place to maintain the level of investments. The same case applies to access roads network maintenance. Despite the community having access to water, the current challenge is that some of the water sources have some level of contamination that still needs to be addressed.