No Distance Too Far: Alima’s 3 Mile Walk to Provide Nutrition for her Family

Nutrition plays a key role in the development of individuals, families, communities, and the nation of Ghana as a whole. The United Nations’ second Sustainable Development Goal calls for the total elimination of hunger and all forms of malnutrition across all ages. Poverty has rendered a great number of people food insecure, which has caused inadequate dietary intake, diseases, and malnutrition.

Self-Help International is working to tackle this development goal by addressing infant malnutrition through the Growing Healthy Food, Growing Healthy Children (GHFGHC) program. 

Alima feels that Self-Help’s GHFGHC program has benefited her entire family. Alima is not a resident of the village of Kukubuso where Self-Help has a GHFGHC group, but she attends the mosque in the community every Friday. In 2019, she was one of the women who enrolled in the GHFGHC program in Kukubuso. Although she has to walk over 5 km (over 3 mi) to Kukubuso on Tuesdays to attend the meetings, the distance does not prevent her from attending. 

According to Alima, she is motivated to come to the meeting because of the counseling and the food supplements she receives weekly. She said that she and her husband could not afford to give her child eggs, so she sees the program as a means to ensure that her children have access to good nutrition. 

“The supplement I receive from Self-Help is able to provide breakfast for my family every two days,” Alima said. “My involvement with Self-Help has helped me learn how to provide a nutritional weaning diet for my child using locally available foods, and I’m able to prepare them for my family. This has really eased the burden of providing food for the family in the morning and has also helped improve our standard of living.”

Good nutrition is an important part of living a healthy life, and food choices impact people’s health and how they feel today, tomorrow, and long into the future.

“With the help of Self-Help, my family is able to get adequate nutrients in our diet,” Alima said.

Alima shared that every aspect of her life has seen a positive change as a result from the nutrition education she is getting from Self-Help’s nutrition staff. Alima is one of the mothers who is able to provide helpful answers to questions asked during nutrition counseling sessions – an indication that she has learned something from her time with the program.

Alima has moved from thinking that every food is merely food to adopting a more conscious thought process for selecting what she feeds herself and her family. Alima gratefully thanked Self-Help for helping her family and her enjoy good, nutritious meals.