The Nutrition Seed Project

Food products

The Seed project is pilot research looking at the links between livestock value chains (LVCs) and nutrition outcomes in poor urban residents of Nairobi. Our aim is to investigate the relationship between consumers’ access to and use of different animal-food sources and their nutritional status. Prof Jonathan Rushton, Dr Barbara Häsler and Dr Pablo Alarcón (Royal Veterinary College), Dr Kathleen Colverson (International Livestock Research Institute), Prof Eric Fèvre (University of Liverpool), and Dr Elaine Ferguson (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) were awarded a CGIAR grant for this research, which was supplemented with funding by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health.

Finger pricking

A postdoctoral researcher (Dr. Paula Domínguez-Salas) and four research assistants (Emma Osoro, Douglas Angogo, Ju-dith Mwangangi and Gideon Mwangi – see staff profiles) were recruited for this work. The study builds on the Economic Thread of Urban Zoo. LVC work and both teams work closely in specific areas, namely in Dagoretti and Korogocho. In Korogocho, the teams received logistic support from the African Population and Health Research Centre.

Our target population is non-pregnant women of reproductive age and children 1 to 3 years. In each household, we completed a 24-h dietary recall, asking women to remem-ber and estimate with food models everything that they and their children ate on the previous day. Data on socio-demographic characteristics, livestock keeping and pur-chase choices were also collected, followed by anthropometric and haemoglobin meas-urements. Data collection for 200 households is nearly completed and data analysis will start in March 2014.

In addition to producing novel data on the potential links between LVCs and nutrition, this research will inform the development of a larger grant proposal on leveraging ani-mal source foods for nutrition. We would like to thank all our supportive participants of Dagoretti and Korogocho for their help in this study.

The Nutrition Team:

From left, Paula Domingues Salas (Post Doc), Emma Osoro (BSc. Bio-medical Science & Technology), Gideon Mwangi (BSc. Biotechnology); Judith Mwangangi (BSc. Foods, Nutri-tion and Dietetics), Ibra (security guide), Douglas Angogo (BSc. Environmental Health), Richard (driver) and Abdi (security guide), dropping school material at one of the two public schools in Korogocho.