Dr Juliana Cheboi

Kenya | Smallholder farmers are vital to Africa's food production, yet they face disproportionate vulnerability to food insecurity, hunger, poverty, and conflict. Unpredictable rainfall exacerbates these challenges, necessitating agricultural interventions to minimise risks, build resilience, and enhance food and nutrition security.

Dr Juliana Cheboi's research aims to bolster sustainable development through increased access to and consumption of nutritious, climate-smart crops, facilitated by behaviour change communication and value-added technologies. This approach promotes sustainable food systems and aligns with the politics of sustainability by fostering inclusive agricultural practices that empower women. Gender mainstreaming will be emphasised, ensuring active participation by women in decision-making, food choices, and resource control, thereby fostering equity and social cohesion.

Resilience is addressed by creating robust systems that withstand climatic shocks while promoting household economic stability. The integration of value-added technology will enhance rural livelihoods by generating employment opportunities, establishing business hubs, and increasing household income. Collaborative efforts with County Government programs and rural community partners ensure scalability and a shared vision for sustainability. By combining these strategies, the project tackles immediate food security issues and builds long-term community resilience. It also promotes inclusive development to strengthen food and nutrition security by fostering sustainable consumption and production of climate-smart crops through behaviour change strategies and technological innovations for value addition.

The project aims to improve women's capacity to influence household nutrition behaviours, dietary diversity, and food choices through the Nutrition Social Behavioural Change Communication (NSBCC) strategy. Enhancing knowledge and control over household income will support increased food production, consumption, and income generation, enabling the purchase of nutritious foods. Standard food recipes for value-added products using pigeon pea and sweet potatoes will be developed and disseminated through training-of-trainers sessions at the county level. Demonstration training and participatory approaches will be employed to train farmer groups, with hands-on cooking classes further reinforcing these skills. Nutritionists, agri-nutrition officers, and extension workers will cascade the training to local communities, ensuring sustainability. Consumer acceptability studies will identify the most preferred recipes and product formulations for promotion.

Schools will serve as platforms to promote the consumption of nutritious food. Activities such as nutrition campaigns and cooking demonstrations will reinforce lessons from the Competency-Based Curriculum. These initiatives aim to influence children's nutrition behaviours and indirectly impact family dietary habits. Dr Cheboi's project will adopt a participatory approach to engage women, men, and youth at the household and community levels in decision-making and resource control. Tailored climate-smart agriculture interventions will address the unique skills, resources, and opportunities of each gender group. Methods will include field visits, questionnaires, interviews, and focus group discussions (FGDs) to identify gender-specific needs and catalyse adoption processes. By fostering inclusive participation, the project will empower women and other marginalised groups, ensuring equitable involvement in accessing, managing, and deciding on food choices, ultimately enhancing community resilience and food security.

The project begins with a two-month preparation phase, during which baseline surveys will be conducted on dietary habits, preferred crops, and existing knowledge gaps in nutrition. Partnerships will be established with local stakeholders, and training materials will be developed to support this initiative. Over the next two months, capacity building will focus on training county-level staff, including nutritionists and agricultural officers, on behaviour change communication and value addition. Trainers will cascade knowledge to farmer groups through cooking demonstrations and workshops. During implementation, which will take an additional two months, pigeon pea and sweet potato seeds will be distributed, school gardening programs will be launched, and community campaigns will be conducted to promote climate-smart crops. Participatory cooking classes and value-added activities will further engage participants. The final phase involves evaluating the impact of the interventions through consumer acceptability studies, monitoring improvements in dietary diversity, and documenting lessons learned to scale successful strategies.

To enhance gender mainstreaming in food decision-making, Dr Cheboi will analyse gender to understand household decision-making roles and resource control. This phase ensures stakeholder engagement for gender-sensitive approaches. This will be followed by designing and delivering tailored training modules to address barriers that women and marginalised groups face in decision-making and resource access. Focus group discussions will be conducted to refine strategies for promoting equitable participation. Gender-inclusive workshops and support for women-led initiatives will be carried out to empower women in decision-making and economic activities. A monitoring and evaluation framework will be developed and implemented to measure key indicators, including increased participation of women in decision-making and improved access to resources.

Dr Juliana J. Cheboi is a lecturer and researcher of Plant breeding and Biotechnology at the Department of Plant Science and Crop Protection, University of Nairobi. She teaches, conducts research, and develops outreach programs in Plant breeding and Agriculture-related Courses. She also supervises students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels on plant breeding and other agricultural-related courses. She is a member of the African Plant Breeding Association (APBA) and the current vice chair of the Plant Breeding Association of Kenya (PBAK). She has won several fellowships, including the Future Africa Research Leadership (FAR-Leaf II), Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS), Food Systems Research Network for Africa (FSNET), African Plant Breeding Academy, the Agriculture for Food Security-AgriFoSe, and the African Bioscience Challenge Fellowship (ABCF). She has bid and collaborated on over five winning grants. She has also authored and co-authored more than 10 peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr Cheboi is very keen on working with drought-resilient crops that have great potential to alleviate malnutrition and improve food security among the rural and urban poor in Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa, where the effects of drought and climate change are significant. She has worked closely with smallholder farmers in outreach programs to disseminate knowledge on technologies, innovations and management practices that can be utilised to improve production and livelihoods.