Addressing Nutritional Problems with Homestead Gardening: Care’s Experience in Bangladesh

CARE Bangladesh’s Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR) sector currently implements a number of projects targeted at food-insecure farm households to enhance the livelihood security of beneficiary farmers (see Table 1). These projects work with targeted land-poor male and female farmers to build their capacity to innovate for increasing, diversifying, and sustaining farm production in an environmentally friendly manner. A few of these projects, namely LIFT, SHABGE-DFID, and SHABGESDC, focus exclusively on land in and around the homestead. Experiences from the ANR projects support the notion that strengthening homestead production systems for planned year-round production certainly increases the availability, consumption, and sales of vegetables and fruits for land-poor rural households, resulting in improved nutritional status. However, the nutritional problem is complex in Bangladesh, and a number of factors contribute to it: insufficient food intake; inadequate knowledge of nutrition; poor food-hygiene behavior; and limited access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and primary health care facilities, to name a few. Women and girls suffer most from the problem. Therefore, to maximize nutritional impact, homestead production and income-augmenting interventions need to be combined with interventions that promote nutrition knowledge that leads to behavioral change, reduces the human health-risk factors, and eliminates gender-discriminatory practices.