Project profile — Purchase for Progress and Scaling Up Nutrition in Guatemala

• Guatemala (100.00%)

• Basic Health: Basic nutrition (12240) (50.00%)
• Food crop production:
Food crop production (31161) (40.00%)
Plant and post-harvest protection and pest control (31192) (10.00%)

• Gender equality (significant objective)
• Environmental sustainability (cross-cutting) (significant objective)
• Participatory development and good governance (not targeted)
• Trade development (not targeted)
• Biodiversity (not targeted)
• Climate change mitigation (significant objective)
• Climate Change Adaptation (not targeted)
• Urban issues (not targeted)
• Desertification (not targeted)
• Children's issues (not targeted)
• Youth Issues (not targeted)
• Indigenous Issues (significant objective)
• Disability (not targeted)
• ICT as a tool for development (not targeted)

This project aims to improve access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food for women, men, girls and boys in Guatemala. The project supports the World Food Programme's (WFP) Purchase for Progress (P4P) Program in Guatemala. It promotes an integrated strategy comprising three components: i) Purchase for Progress, which improves the incomes of smallholder farmers through the increased quantity and quality of production and sales of surpluses to markets; ii) Scaling-up Nutrition, which helps prevent and reduce chronic malnutrition through distribution of fortified food and nutrition education; and iii) Resilience, which improves community conditions in disaster-prone areas, and enhances food availability throughout the year. Project activities include the following: (1) providing technical assistance to and sharing best practices with small-scale farmers on crop management and technologies to increase the quality and quantity of their yields; (2) promoting better post-harvest management to reduce crop losses; (3) assisting farmer organizations to increase sales and receive fair market prices from buyers; (4) purchasing food from participating farmer organizations’ crop surpluses to feed up to 17,500 infants and children aged 6-23 months per year and up to 10,000 pregnant and lactating women per year to complement breastfeeding and prevent stunting or chronic undernutrition; and (5) strengthening the business management skills of small-scale farmer organizations and increasing women farmers' participation, representation and skills.

The expected intermediate outcomes for this project include: (1) increased sustainable agricultural production and productivity for rural smallholder farmers, especially women farmers; (2) improved consumption of nutritious foods or supplements for food-insecure, undernourished or food aid dependent populations; and (3) increased women’s participation, representation and decision making in small farmers’ organizations and communities.

Results achieved as of March 2016 include: Purchase for Progress (P4P) component: (1) 27 farmer organizations located in nineteen municipalities in the Northeastern region of Guatemala, had their organizational structure strengthened; more specifically, all of them now have a working “ board”, and 25 now have a gender commission; (2) 240 demonstration plots were implemented using best practices such as minimum tillage, green manure, irrigation and contour; (3) 17 farmer organizations have commercialized maize and 12 have commercialized black beans; (4) 280.2 metric tons of black beans and 1,154.05 metric tons of maize were purchased by the WFP, while 22.6 metric tons of maize was purchased locally to produce complementary food for the resilience-building component of the project; and (5) the project identified a 20% increase in women participating as agriculture promoters in the farmers’ organizations. Resilience component: (1) 375 families of Zacapa and El Progreso (180 women or 48% and 195 men or 52%), received food assistance in exchange for improving community resilience: 100% of these families have been trained on nutritional practices, in addition, the food distributed went to families that worked in soil and water conservation measures and natural resources management to better protect the environment in the communities; and (4) a more diverse diet (cereals, tubers, legumes, oils and fats, milk products, fruits and vegetables) was introduced to each family (89.9% of the targeted families now have an acceptable diet). Scaling up Nutrition component: (1) 15,009 children (6 to 24 years old) improved the quality of their complementary feeding in Solola and Chimaltenango through the delivery of a complementary cereal called “Mi Comidita”; (2) a total of 694 women were trained as peer mothers in Solola and Chimatenango, surpassing the target of 300 women per department; and (3) 4,026 of women who are pregnant in Solola and Chimaltenango visited health centers where they had access to the complementary food.

• Proactive disclosure