Professor Gbadebo Odularu, the founder of No Hunger Initiatives, has a background in economics, but with a special interest in food policy economics. Having had additional training as an agricultural and rural development economist, it’s no wonder that the experiences “solidified my interest in food issues, in hunger eradication, in malnutrition elimination,” to quote his words. In this interview with PLAC Beam, Odularu speaks on hunger, health and the work of his organization.
On hunger:
Hunger is not only in Africa or Nigeria; hunger is a global problem. I’ve been teaching, consulting for government, international organisations and collaborating with my colleagues in the food sector on eradicating hunger and contributing to the food systems at the global level as well as at the community level. More importantly, I’m not just looking at the hunger problem just from the hunger perspective, I’m also relating it to the health system. The COVID -19 (pandemic) has helped us to further understand that there is no system within our communities that could exist in isolation or silos. The food system has to work in collaboration or alignment with the health system as well as the market system. All these systems that appear seemingly operating in silos will be more efficient if they are able to work together, and we will be able to overcome hunger and malnutrition. That is also part of the strategy we are using in No Hunger Initiatives through our programmes, activities, a more nutrition-focused approach in solving hunger, especially among the vulnerable communities.
On the organization’s vision and mission:
The No Hunger Initiative is a non-profit organisation driven by the vision to enhance food and nutritional security among vulnerable communities. The tool that No Hunger Initiative is deploying is a food-banking framework, a strategy in which food that is about to be wasted are gathered and used to meet the nutritional needs of the less privileged. Specifically, we are focusing on the internally displaced people. The problem that No Hunger Initiative is trying to solve cuts across all the sustainable development goals, but we are focusing on food security. At the same time, we are including nutritional security because in this age, just eating any food is not really a good thing. We want to make sure through No Hunger Initiative and its partners that we promote nutritional security.
On the scale of the hunger problem in Nigeria:
The national hunger problem as we know is increasing by the day, especially in northeast Nigeria. Since we are in Abuja, we are focused on the internally displaced persons in Abuja and environs. We also focus on nursing mothers and pregnant women, provide food support to them and empowerment programmes that will help them become more informed in making decisions about their careers, future and food choices that is best for them and their family. That’s the mission we hope to achieve: a Nigeria and Africa or a world in which there is no one that goes to bed hungry.
Currently, there are so many Nigerians that do not have a meal in a day. Many of them go days without a meal. Our vision is to eradicate that by adopting a systems approach, a multi-stakeholder approach that looks at all intersectoral interventions in overcoming hunger and malnutrition in Nigeria. Our three main objectives are creating value by eradicating hunger, creating opportunities by eradicating hunger among the vulnerable communities and leveraging sustainable partnerships and strategic alliances to eradicate hunger. We were established officially and formally in April 2021.
If you look much deeper into the problem that the vulnerable communities are facing, the internally displaced persons, then the problem becomes really pathetic. Since 2019, we have been providing community breakfast to laborers or workers that receive daily wages. We go to selected places in Abuja and provide early morning community breakfast. We also identify selected families like women, orphans, widows, based on their needs. We visit them and provide food items.
Professor Gbadebo Odularu, the founder of No Hunger Initiatives
On the tools used by No Hunger Initiative:
We have programmes and activities which are the vehicles we use to touch the lives and the communities where we serve, especially the internally displaced persons as well as the vulnerable community members. We focus on the Kuchingoro Internally Displaced People’s camp in Abuja. That’s where we’ve been doing most work in terms of monthly food provision, cooking food and making it available to people. The first programme of activity we do is our monthly food outreach, a monthly distribution of food to vulnerable communities. So far, we have provided not less than 20,000 kilograms of food which we have distributed to families. We have also made sure that we pay particular attention to women, mothers and widows. We also conduct blood donations, because solving hunger is not a food problem alone. So, we collaborate with health-related organisations. We collaborated with a nursing programme to provide blood donation that helped to treat at risk children and elderly patients.
In the IDP camp there will be health challenges one way or the other, especially when there is a high level of food insecurity and malnutrition. The people do not eat well, they do not live well, the shelter or accommodation is not at its best and the environment is not very enabling. The health crisis became compounded with the COVID – 19. So as part of our monthly outreach, there are blood and clothes donations to fortify the children and get them prepared for adverse weather conditions. So, clothes for children, household items, toys, selected book items, blood donations for the very weak people of the IDP or vulnerable community members. This is one of our flagship projects.
The other part of what we do is empowering our communities. Like I said, providing food for them is not the only solution. Even in the developed countries like U.K. and U.S., food items are given to the less privileged and vulnerable. It has been like that for long, using the food-banking framework. It is a means to an end, not the end to itself. That’s why we thought through it as the leadership of No Hunger Initiatives that we must empower these people. We just don’t want to keep giving them forever, but we want to show them how to fish, how to make money and food for themselves, how they could tap into the available resources provided by the community or government in order to make themselves more independent. What the programme does is to enable women and other vulnerable members of the community, especially internally displaced women, to learn new agricultural practices. We impart agricultural knowledge that would help them to produce nutritious food for themselves and their family. We know that one of the ways to get this done is to further create awareness about these nutritional meals. Sometimes there is the Ministry of Health to provide that information. What we do is to further emphasise the role of vegetables. No matter how little or insignificant vegetables are they are very nutritional and very easy to produce especially in our backyards, free land, bag or sack. So, fruits, vegetables, tomatoes, all forms of vegetable, okro, we produce like that. On a regular basis, we embark on training programmes which we call empowerment programmes for women, communities, internally displaced persons, provide them with all these agricultural practices or knowledge especially on vegetables, that the duration between production and harvest is very short. We have done this for over 200 people in terms of training and follow up. The trainer is another organisation that is called Catofoods, which is into agribusinesses and is also well versed on how to provide nutritional meals. We collaborated with them to see how we could provide on a regular basis agricultural training to the internally displaced persons on vegetables, tomatoes, pepper, onions.
We have another programme which we call Nutrify 365. Just as the name says, Nutrify comes from the name Nutrition and 365 means the number of days in a year. The whole essence of Nutrify 365 is an intervention programme strictly for malnourished children as well as pregnant women, nursing mothers. We target them specifically because we know that these are special and important members of our communities that will help Nigeria and Africa to reproduce its population and make them great again. Preparing children in Nigeria, in Africa, for the future, requires much more than just providing the educational tools for them. It requires them to be nutritionally prepared. That is what this programme is out to do.
There is a fourth programme, the Community Breakfast. What we do is to identify, mostly, women entrepreneurs that provide, for example akara and ogi (pap). We identify such entrepreneur or a retailer that is by the roadside. What we do is to go there so that No Hunger Initiatives will be responsible for the meal people will eat for that breakfast. What we do is to go early that morning, look at the population of the labourers that are there. Then, we talk to the entrepreneur, mostly a female seller, and tell them that for the food that will be consumed, we will be responsible for it. We do this also on a monthly basis.
The final programme that we also implement is called Empowerment and Awareness Training Programme. The training is basically providing knowledge and tools, especially for the youths, among the internally displaced persons. The series that we started for that is called Digify IDP. We realised that for those of them that have smartphones, they could be used as tools to empower youths and people so they would be able to understand the future. So, in collaboration with another organisation that is really focused on ICT, we organised the training workshop for the IDPs. This was to show them they can make better use of their smartphones.
On funding and impact of Covid-19:
We require a lot of funding. If we are expecting funds, and the funding is yet to come, we start off using our personal savings because it is what we believe in. We started off using our personal savings.
We have a leadership team from all over the world: Africa, U.S., U.K., Canada. So, anytime we make a call that this is what we are doing, they help us in sourcing for funds. The funds we have been using so far have been from this leadership team as well as their network members.
Of course, we have a strategy to generate funding from institutional donors and from other parent organisations, such as the Global Food Bank Network, which is headquartered in Chicago. So, we have a collaboration with them as one of our strategies for generating funds. We have multi-strategies which we are using to generate funds.
That leads us to the second part of the question on COVID-19. It has affected funding in two ways. It has created more enlightenment and awareness about the humanitarian crisis. It has created more reasons for the whole world to believe that there is need for funding against hunger, malnutrition and humanitarian issues. At the same time, COVID has adversely affected economies, jobs were lost, most macro economies both in the developed and developing countries collapsed. That is affecting funding generally, but at the same time, we still have our strategies. We are connecting and collaborating with strategic partners, institutional donors that will be able to collaborate with us in order to help us realise our vision for Nigeria and for Africa.
On sourcing for food:
Food provided are mainly sourced from the markets. Once we get the funding, we go to the market to get the food items for the vulnerable communities. We convert the financial donation of the leadership team to procure food. Even for the community breakfast, the pap and bean cake, we just go to the sellers. The sellers have gotten the food, they are making it, so we just pay for it.
On organization’s biggest achievement:
Our biggest achievement has been all our programmes. Our foremost programme that we do on a monthly basis, I will see it as one of our biggest achievements. That is, making food donations to the community. Sometimes, we do it more than monthly. We try to make it consistent on a monthly basis. Our biggest achievement is making this food available and in the right quantity that would be enough for all the IDPs. The Kuchingoro IDP management are already aware and know that this is what we have been doing. We also see it as an achievement because we have started communicating with the appropriate government ministries, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture. They have seen what we have been doing. It’s been in the news. We also see this as an achievement because if you saw the conditions of how they lived, what they wore, you’ll see our empowerment programme is really helping them to become better.
On the biggest challenges:
Of course, one of the major challenges in implementing and coordinating programmes like these. Finance is one of the major challenges but with time our passion to deliver on our vision really overrides finance as a challenge.
That’s why we keep doing it on a monthly basis – the food outreach programme – creating awareness through our social media platforms. If you check our social media platforms, you’ll see how consistent we have been in sharing what we are doing,
The challenges are there in terms of coordination and delivery in all we’ve been doing, because they require resources. They require human resources and financial resources. Those challenges are surmountable challenges for us because our vision to eradicate hunger and malnutrition continues to push us on to overcome.
On expectations from the government:
There are tons of things and reforms that government can implement to address hunger. The policies that we deploy in addressing hunger in the yester years have failed because if they have worked, there should not be increasing hunger and poverty in our lands, even among children. There is no way they will uphold democratic values if people are hungry. If parents are hungry and they go to vote, if they find someone that will buy their vote, they will sell the vote to the person because they are hungry and poor. Our role as No Hunger Initiatives is not just focusing on the food perspective but we are looking at the systems perspective to eradicating hunger and part of it is also collaborating with organisations like PLAC and see how we can provide the right evidence to the government in helping to make the right policy choices, implement the right policy reforms in eradicating hunger.
If I say the right policy reforms, like I said earlier, we should think about it in a different way in terms of how to enhance the legislative capacities. I think one of the ways hunger problem can be addressed is from the legislative viewpoint, from the policy reform perspective. If the government wants to be giving unemployed youths 10,000 naira per month, it should not be a political statement. It should be well enshrined in the laws, that if you can provide the evidence that you are a youth, elderly person or vulnerable member of our community and you haven’t gotten a job to do for this period of time, our law requires us that we should give you this stipend just to keep body and soul together. If a person is internally displaced, just putting them into makeshift IDP camps is not enough. We should find a legislative intervention that is much stronger than what is currently happening. That is what No Hunger Initiative stands for. That’s what we are looking forward to and looking for strategic, like-minded organisations and institutions that we can work together to deploy such policy reforms and legislative instruments to help address hunger and poverty.
