What happens when you support communities unconditionally to act as they see fit to tackle malnutrition? You get initiatives that seem, on the face of it, a long way from typical malnutrition interventions, whether that’s making soap, refurbishing a health centre or starting a poultry farm. Stephanie Buell of Action Contre la Faim on the “Boolo Xeex Xibon” project in Senegal – and how it actually put the community at the centre of the fight against malnutrition.
Even when aid actors emphasise community engagement, there isn’t often real space for a community to truly say “this is what we want” and trust that the project will respond. Even rarer is communities being given the resources to put something into action themselves.
I am going to tell you about a project that does both these things. I should say straight away that I am the Country Director of Action Contre la Faim (ACF) in Senegal, which is behind this project, but I hope the account below and the evidence we have collected will demonstrate the value of our approach. Indeed, the fact that this was an action research project is what allowed us to really document that process of what it takes to be truly community-led.
As our project participant Darou Diakhour said: “The big difference between this project and others resides in the fact that it belongs to us. It is ours, and we must invest our efforts to make sure it succeeds.”
The project is “Boolo Xeex Xibon” – which means “Together to Combat Malnutrition” in Wolof – and has been running since April 2022 in four different villages in Louga in the North of Senegal. Louga as a region has a global acute malnutrition rate of 28.4%, which is well above the national average. Chronic malnutrition is 21.9% – also above average. Additionally, due to its location in the Sahelian north of the country, Louga is very prone to the effects of climate change and significant food insecurity. Rural communities also suffer from a lack of access to key services, including healthcare.
Communities decide and drive the whole project
The goal is to prevent child malnutrition by strengthening community resilience to multi-faceted shocks. But how that actually happens is left entirely up to each of the four villages/communities.
As the community is in the driver’s seat throughout the entire project cycle, the role of ACF is only to facilitate the process and support communities towards autonomy and resilience.
Within the different levels of community engagement, the BXX project aspires to reach the fifth: that is, to actually empower or “defer to” the people we are seeking to support. Practically speaking, this was the facilitation of regular discussions (weekly over three years in our four target villages) which meant first identifying the main risk factors for malnutrition, and then proposing activities that would address these risks, as well as a way to monitor the desired success of each activity.
These activities included things like setting up a small-scale poultry farm, purchasing cattle, rehabilitating the local health centre, opening a local shop, and making bleach and soap. Each village received its funding – unconditionally – to put these chosen activities in place.
‘In one of the community discussion sessions I attended, I found myself tempted to steer the conversation more towards malnutrition prevention. But that was not the point of the session, so I continued to listen…’
What about monitoring and refining the projects? Our approach dispensed with the need for logical frameworks, or logframes, and workplans. Instead, throughout this process, the discussion sessions continued, to see whether the activities were having the impact desired by the community (based on earlier discussions of how we would monitor success), what was learned, and what more could be done. The project adapts to evolving needs as communities gain better understanding of local causes of malnutrition and progressively develop strategies to address them.
Communities choose to prioritise root causes
At this point, you might be wondering to yourself what this project actually has to do with malnutrition, as many of the activities chosen by each of the four communities ensured access to an income or trade.
We felt that this approach, of letting the community decide what best suits them, is what it would take in order to sustainably address the multiple causes of malnutrition in a given community. The decision was to address root causes instead of traditional, direct malnutrition interventions.
And indeed we know from years of expertise and data – namely from the Link NCA studies – that malnutrition prevention must be multi-sectoral. In this case, the fact that the communities mostly chose to prioritise an income as their most urgent need showed us that this was the most important root cause of malnutrition in these contexts. The project then provided the resources and space to address this.
Four key insights
Ok so what did we actually learn?
- Building trust with the ACF community mobiliser who co-facilitated the discussions and project was key: they knew they could count on his presence, support, and ability to listen and this increased the trust in the project as a whole.
- It’s important to adjust to the community’s rhythm and do things in their own time, in step with local routines in order to agree on a common, local understanding of the problem – in this case the causes of child malnutrition.
- Putting financial resources in the hands of community members is important – firstly because it allows them to actually own the project activities but also because it builds trust and accountability.
- This type of community-led project can also reinforce social cohesion and potentially help them face future shocks through better community governance and mutual resilience.
This approach can feel daunting. As aid workers, we are so used to being in the driver’s seat that giving up control may feel uncomfortable. I know I felt this myself at times in this project: in one of the community discussion sessions I attended, I found myself tempted to steer the conversation more towards malnutrition prevention. But that was not the point of the session, so I continued to listen.
That listening meant that, over a few more discussion sessions, the community themselves (with our community mobiliser helping to guide when needed) came up with the main risks they wanted to try and address: namely, lack of income, poor quality of roads, loss of soil fertility due to climate change, and how all the youth were migrating to Dakar for jobs. These are actually linked to malnutrition prevention in a myriad of ways but the act of listening meant we got a much richer and deeper analysis and therefore larger array of solutions.
So, going back to the analogy of the driver: this is about staying in the car, and having the community do the driving. But more than that, it’s about practising humility: that maybe we didn’t know the road as well as we thought we did, and trusting our driver to get us there in the end.
The feedback from our participants does suggest they felt the difference. As one project participant in Nguer Nguer village said: “Many projects come, ask us questions on our needs, and then disappear. With ACF, we saw something concrete: trainings, follow-up, technical support. This project is different.”
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