According to the food basket costs estimates for 16 households in Lango Sub-Region that we made during our training, five households did not include fruits in their food items for an entire month. This is possible because people do not know the value of eating such fruits for our bodies.
Even in the costs estimates for households that included fruits in their dietary consumption, fruits were seemingly not given the highest priority. For example, one household spent Ushs. 160,000 (one hundred and sixty thousand shillings) on cooking oil in a month and only Ushs. 60,000 (sixty thousand shillings) on fruits in the same month.
People do not know that eating of citrus fruits that are rich in Vitamin C help to maintain our body healthy. When a household does not consume citrus fruits that are rich in Vitamin C, members of that household will most likely face the consequence of being attacked by scurvy.
When a household is affected with scurvy, since it weakens the body and also makes one feel fatigue, it will affect the level of their productivity. It will as well result in the household spending on treatment, which will likely divert money away from buying food, and could lead to food insecurity.
For a household to live a healthy life and be productive, there is need for it to have a proper balanced diet with citrus fruits included in their diet as a genuine need.
By Robert Oluka, Innovator in Training in First Cohort of CPAR Uganda programme: “Mentoring Young Adults into Innovators against Poverty”; and Volunteer Logistics Support Assistant with CPAR Uganda. Robert shared his learning from the content of and discussions during the training sessions of Module I: Understanding Poverty in Rural Uganda of the CPAR Uganda programme. For this article, it was particularly so from the fieldwork session in which the innovators in training were introduced to generating evidence based opinions from own data and from reading publications, such a, the “Field Exchange” Journal, hardcopies of which are among the resources in CPAR Uganda’s Prof. Fred Opio Ekong Memorial Library. Read more about Robert here.
Photo: Innovators in training researching in the Prof. Fred Opio Ekong Memorial Library. Photo taken by Ms. Norah Owaraga, Lead Mentor.
CPAR Uganda Ltd 