Assessment of consumers' preference for orange-fleshed sweet potato puree chapati: a case of rural and urban consumers in Kenya.

BACKGROUND: Orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) is bio-fortified with vitamin A precursors through breeding and is thus ideal for combating vitamin A deficiency (VAD). One of the potential mechanisms to promote the consumption of OFSP is to enhance its availability through processing into products with a longer shelf life and more desirable to consumers. However, very few farmers and agro-processors practice value addition due to market uncertainties; there is little information on market availability for OFSP products. This study examined consumers' preference for OFSP puree chapati in rural and urban areas of Kenya, using the contingent valuation method. Data was collected from a random sample of 411 sweet potato consumers and a double-bounded logit model was applied to analyze consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for OFSP puree chapati. RESULTS: Consumers were willing to pay a price of Kenya shillings (KES) 19 (USD 0.14) and 35 (USD 0.26) for OFSP puree chapati in Homa Bay and Nairobi counties, respectively. The presence of children under 5 years in a household, consumers' awareness of OFSP products and benefits of consuming OFSP, and level of education had a positive and significant influence on WTP for OFSP puree chapati in both regions. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that consumers exhibited a positive preference for OFSP puree chapati. In order to increase the consumption of OFSP and its value-added products, it is important to promote consumer awareness of OFSP puree chapati and other such nutritious products through cooking demonstrations and other nudging approaches using attractive illustrations and social media platforms that engage mothers and care-givers of children under 5 years old as well as the youth. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Targeting market segment needs with public-good crop breeding investments: A case study with potato and sweetpotato focused on poverty alleviation, nutrition and gender.

Crop breeding programs have often focused on the release of new varieties that target yield improvement to achieve food security and reduce poverty. While continued investments in this objective are justified, there is a need for breeding programs to be increasingly more demand-driven and responsive to the changing customer preferences and population dynamics. This paper analyses the responsiveness of global potato and sweetpotato breeding programs pursued by the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners to three major development indicators: poverty, malnutrition and gender. The study followed a seed product market segmentation blueprint developed by the Excellence in Breeding platform (EiB) to identify, describe, and estimate the sizes of the market segments at subregional levels. We then estimated the potential poverty and nutrition impacts of investments in the respective market segments. Further, we employed the G+ tools involving multidisciplinary workshops to evaluate the gender-responsiveness of the breeding programs. Our analysis reveals that future investments in breeding programs will achieve greater impacts by developing varieties for market segments and pipelines that have more poor rural people, high stunting rates among children, anemia prevalence among women of reproductive age, and where there is high vitamin A deficiency. In addition, breeding strategies that reduce gender inequality and enhance appropriate change of gender roles (hence gender transformative) are also required.

Using preschoolers to improve caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practices relating to biofortified crops: Evidence from a randomized nutrition education trial in Kenya.

This 2018 randomized controlled trial examined the role behavioral nudges can play in improving caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) relating to biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP). The experiment involved 431 preschooler-caregiver pairs in 15 villages. The preschoolers were enrolled in public-run Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) centers in the respective villages. Caregivers were first exposed to the routine OFSP promotion activities in the area - invited to cooking demonstration workshops and issued with free OFSP vines to plant. A baseline survey followed. Next, the 15 villages were randomized into four study groups (a control and three treatments). The interventions were deployed for 30 days as follows: Treatment 1 - preschoolers issued OFSP-branded exercise books, class posters, and poems; Treatment 2 - caregivers received phone-mediated text messages; and Treatment 3 - received the full suite of interventions. This study analyzed the endline and baseline data and finds that, in general, changes in KAP scores were negatively associated with control group (p = .005) and positively associated with Treatment 3 (p = .02). Specifically, Treatment 3 significantly increased caregivers' knowledge of OFSP production, consumption, and vitamin A. Treatment 2 significantly improved their attitude too. It concludes that an integrated complementary nutrition education approach targeting preschooler-caregiver pairs is more effective in increasing knowledge of cultivation and consumption of OFSP. It discusses the implications for the design of more effective nutrition programs targeting households with preschoolers to accelerate the fight against vitamin A deficiency (VAD).

Quality and psychosocial factors influencing purchase of orange-fleshed sweetpotato bread.

This 2018 study, conducted in six Tusky's supermarkets in Nairobi, Kenya, combined the Just-About-Right, Penalty and Mean-End-Chain analyses to examine the quality and psychosocial factors influencing the purchase of a novel bread made from orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP), a biofortified crop, focusing on sixty-one male and eighty female urban OFSP bread buyers recruited at point of purchase. It finds that sensory and psychosocial factors drive purchasing decisions and that some of the bread's sensory characteristics are misaligned with consumers' expectations. It also finds that women and men's evaluations of the bread's characteristics are different, as are their motivations for purchase. However, good sensory attributes and the knowledge of the bread's nutritional value were key drivers. Some misaligned characteristics reveal levers for the reformulation of the bread and present opportunities for segmenting the market. Several other implications of the findings for policy and future improvement of the bread are discussed.

Do Market-oriented Engendered Agriculture-health Interventions Affect Household Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from an Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato Project in Rwanda.

The number of agricultural interventions promoting biofortified crops as a strategy to combat micronutrient malnutrition have increased significantly during the past decade. These interventions aim to improve the intake of key nutrients and sometimes other nutrition outcomes. In this study, we assess the impact of a market-oriented gender-sensitive agriculture-health project on household food consumption and food security. We use gender-disaggregated data from 842 sweetpotato farmers and a series of econometric techniques to assess the project's impact on food consumption household food security. The study finds unambiguous and strong impact of the project on both household food consumption and food security. Moreover, female-headed participant households benefitted much more from participation than did male-headed households. We further find that nonparticipant households would also have benefitted had they participated. The findings imply the importance of designing market-focused projects with a gender lens. They also imply that market-oriented agriculture-sensitive interventions do not necessarily harm the nutritional status of farm households.

Predictors of Intention to Integrate Biofortified Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato in Child Feeding: A Field Information Experiment in Rural Kenya.

The study assesses the psychosocial predictors of intention to integrate biofortified pro-vitamin A orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) in proper complementary feeding (PCF) among women who received either verbal or verbal and visual demonstrations on OFSP-based foods. A total of 764 randomly selected women grouped into four categories, namely pregnant women, women with infants, women with young children, and potential mothers, participated in this study. Using a structural equation model of predicted intentions based on an extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) the study found goal-setting, perceived behavior control, subjective norms, and attitudes had a significant influence on intention to integrate OFSP in PCF. Unexpectedly, knowledge of the various health benefits of OFSP did not positively influence intention. Probabilistic recursive regression was then used to estimate the relationship between the intention to provide PCF practices and its potential antecedents. The results then showed that the model structure and explanatory power was information-specific and also revealing outcome differences by category of women. These results have implications on how interventions targeting the improvement of PCF should be organized and delivered. They underscore the need to segment the audience during nutrition education.

Nutrition and food security impacts of quality seeds of biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato: Quasi-experimental evidence from Tanzania.

This study examined the nutrition and food security impacts of a project that was designed to improve availability of disease-free planting materials of biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) in rural Tanzania. Difference-in-difference and matching techniques were employed to estimate causal effects using panel data. Participation in the project increased agronomic and nutritional knowledge of households, raised uptake rate for OFSP varieties, and improved food security status. Effects on nutrition are, however, weak. These results suggest that timely access to quality seeds accompanied by a transfer of skills is important to reduce barriers to adoption of biofortified crops with resulting positive effects on the welfare of rural households. Adequate promotion of both agronomic and nutrition aspects of the technologies may enhance nutrition effects.

Effect of nutrition education and psychosocial factors on child feeding practices: findings of a field experiment with biofortified foods and different women categories.

Despite the efforts to promote good practices in infant and young child feeding (IYCF), the adoption of such practices has been low. Using data from a sample of 665 women, and the theory of planned behavior, we examine the effect of different types of nutrition education and psychosocial factors on the use of recommended IYCF practices. Regression results show that nutrition education and psychosocial factors have strong positive effect on the extent to which IYCF practices are used, with the latter having conflicting individual but overall positive effect. Moreover, coefficients of latter were mostly less than those of the former indicating that pschosocial factors were less important in explaining variability in usage of IYCF than the nutrition education variables. It further finds that different sets of nutrition education and psychosocial factors affect different categories of women, with interactive nutrition education approaches having a greater effect. The findings also suggest need for targeting of beneficiaries with multiple nutrition education approaches.