Students search for causes of malnutrition in Rwanda
It’s one thing for a UBC student to sit in a lecture hall and take notes on food security. It’s quite another to accompany a 22-year-old Rwandan mother who is HIV positive, and her hungry baby, to the hospital.
These were the types of real-life situations in Rwanda that her students tackled earlier this year, says Judy McLean, an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems (LFS).
With UBC’s Go Global office, Mclean has launched a new International Food and Nutrition Security Initiative that sees undergraduates engaged in community-based research and development work. Partnering with UBC is the Faculty of Rural Development of Rwanda’s Institute of Agriculture and Technology at Kibungo (INATEK).
For their field assignment, six UBC students were paired with 12 INATEK students to conduct a household survey on the prevalence and causes of malnutrition in 40 rural villages in Ngoma District, several hours from the capitol city of Kigali.
“Their work was endorsed by the Rwandan government, which has limited capacity to carry out needs assessments in rural villages,” says Mclean.
In Ngoma, the child mortality rate is one in five, with malnutrition believed to be the cause of more than half of these deaths. The research will help provide the basis for an integrated nutrition intervention program targeted at reducing the unacceptable child as well as maternal mortality rates.
“We lived next door to an orphanage where babies were regularly brought in after their mothers died in childbirth,” says Judy McLean. “It was an intensely human and personal experience for all of us.”
“The hardest thing to see is children not having enough food,” says Roberta Wozniak, who graduated from LFS this spring with a degree in nutritional science and then spent two months working in Rwanda.
Early on in the trip, Wozniak met a young mother named Pascasie and her seven-month-old son, Chelsea. “They had no family, no money and no job and had been abandoned by the father of the baby.”
Seeing how thin Chelsea was, Wozniak and Mclean conducted a quick test they use in the field to assess malnourishment.
“We measure the circumference of the child’s mid-upper left arm,” explains Wozniak.
She says while the cutoff point is 11.5 centimeters for severe acute malnutrition, Chelsea’s arm was 10 and a half centimeters — “the circumference of a loonie.”
Wozniak and Mclean helped Pascasie gain admittance at a nearby hospital where the baby was fed fortified formula and tested negative for HIV. Over eight days they bonded despite language barriers.
“It was very hard to say goodbye,” says Wozniak.
This fall, a second team of UBC and INATEK students are picking up where the spring cohort left off. They will compare seasonal findings to inform the next steps of their action plan.
The students will conduct further assessments and interviews with Ngoma District villagers about nutrition and food security, and analyze the data. As well, they will have the opportunity to teach an applied nutrition course at INATEK and work with UNICEF on a “micronutrient” project that looks at the population’s vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
Mclean aims to create more international hands-on learning opportunities, especially for undergraduates keen to support the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
“On a daily basis I receive requests from past and present students asking about global placements,” says McLean, who frequently travels to Cambodia, Rwanda and other developing countries in her work for organizations such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
Each year, she sees enrolment of more than 400 students in her “World Problems in Nutrition” course in the LFS Food, Nutrition and Health program. The class attracts UBC undergraduates from disciplines as varied as African studies, psychology, political science and international relations as well as nutrition and dietetics.
“Our ultimate goal is to develop an undergraduate program stream in the LFS Food and Nutrition program that is unique in North America with a focus on international nutrition,” says Mclean, adding that UBC students currently lack the field experience to design and implement operational research or community-based food and nutrition security interventions.
Students can earn credits for the International Food and Nutrition Security Initiative, which to date has ranged from directed studies to research for toward a master’s thesis.
