LANN supported the socio-economic empowerment of women through Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA), enabling them to independently access and control cash and making them less dependent on men. Furthermore, it meant they were able to prioritize the purchase of items intended to improve health and nutrition. Having the power to choose enables these women to re-invest their savings into productive assets and nutrition-sensitive activities, such as expanding backyard gardens or constructing improved latrines for their households.

Musu T. Koroma, a member of the Tegloma women’s group in Joi community, asserts how LANN has made her less dependent on her husband, enabled her to use resources to meet day-to-day needs, and even make investments for the future:

LANN promotes nutritious crop diversity and empowers women to improve their produce management practices while simultaneously reducing their reliance on men for access to land and agricultural inputs. The women were provided with seeds and tools in order to increase the production and consumption of nutritious crops such as vegetables and legumes. A seed bank system for members of the women’s group was established to support subsistence households which had no savings and which had consumed their seeds intended to be saved for the next planting season (due to poor harvests during the Ebola outbreak). The aim of the bank is to break the perpetual cycle of food insecurity. Furthermore, LANN strengthened the resilience of local communities by promoting increased awareness of a wider range of nutritious food sources. One such example is wild food that grows in local forests – as well as improving dietary diversity, this helps women and families cope during lean periods.

These activities, combined with nutrition education, led to an overall improvement in household nutrition. Household dietary diversity scores (HDDS) increased from 6.2 to 7.44 (out of 12 food groups), while the individual dietary diversity score (IDDS) of children between 6 and 23 months of age increased from 3.44 to 4.26 (out of 7 food groups).

If rural food sources and nutritional security are to be safeguarded, it is essential to ensure that local communities have a right to natural resources (e.g. farmland and forests) along with the chance to manage them in a sustainable manner. In recent years, foreign investors have started to acquire land on a large scale in Sierra Leone, often leaving communities with limited access to the space and resources they require for food production. The customary tenure system places the most productive land in the hands of powerful family lineages. These families increasingly cement their ownership with the cultivation of long-term cash crops, resulting in a class of rural subsistence farmers with limited control over good quality land. These farmers then either have to lease marginal land or work as agricultural labourers.

LANN works with its target communities to analyse the availability of their own natural resources both for sustainable use and to create a basis for negotiation with investors. By mapping and planning participatory land use, communities are able to organise the sustainable use of their natural resources for food production and the generation of income while taking the poorest subsistence farmers into account.

LANN develops a concept for community-based forest management, where communities – with an emphasis on female leadership – take more control over their forest-based resources in agreement with the government. In the context of national food security, LANN therefore ensures the promotion of the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), a FAO-supported process of promoting community-based forestry. It also supports the Right to Food movement’s advocacy efforts in Sierra Leone to strengthen community land ownership via land policy reform.

LANN has proven to be a successful model for providing integrated, yet low-cost nutrition programmes that link behavioural change, gender, agriculture and WASH at the level of the beneficiary. In the context of Sierra Leone, it forms an effective basis for sustainable local development. This is because it demonstrates the significant strides that can be taken towards nutrition security when the most vulnerable members of households and communities are given a voice and control over the resources required for their own development.

Furthermore, LANN seeks the involvement of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security (MAFFS) and the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) to ensure that evidence gained and the lessons learned are continuously shared with policymakers, and that the track record of success up to now continues in the future.

A package of resources providing guidance on LANN programming is available free of charge for interested stakeholders, partners and practitioners. For further information, please contact [email protected]
For more information about Concern’s work in Sierra Leone, including LANN and other programmes, please visit: www.concern.net/insights