Evaluation of kitchen and school garden program in Rwanda

Growing food and non-food items in the Rwandan home-lot has been a food security and resilience based strategy for centuries. The garden structure and its function vary according to the specific needs of individual households.

In Rwanda, the term akarima k’igikoni or kitchen garden has become quite common. Different programs promoting dietary diversity and fighting malnutrition promote the kitchen garden. In the past few years, the Government introduced the Kitchen Garden Program nation-wide with the aim of increasing vegetables and fruit production as well as provision of cheap vegetables and fruit to the household members. The kitchen garden activity is meant to contribute to social benefits like better health, improved nutrition, increased income, employment, food security within the household, and community social life. Households take advantage of homestead land and contribute to supplying fresh daily food and household food system.

Kitchen gardens contribute to household food security by providing direct access to food that can be harvested, prepared and fed to family members, often on a daily basis. Even very poor near landless people can practice gardening on small homestead land, edges of a field, or in containers. Gardening may be done with virtually no economic resources, using locally available planting materials, green manures, “live” fencing and indigenous methods of pest control. Thus, home gardening at some level is a production system that the poor can easily enter.

Kitchen gardening not only improves availability but also answers perhaps part of the question of diversity required for a healthy household. The availability of vegetables and fruits in a kitchen garden should increase consumption and hence mitigate specific types of malnutrition, especially micronutrient malnutrition.

School garden is seen as source of food for improving children diet and is supporting the school feeding program. It also serves in educating children and promoting agricultural practices and nutrition. MINEDUC (Ministry of Education) is committed to improve nutrition among school children and better using the school curricula and nutrition demonstration gardens to better educate all children on practical aspects of nutrition. The National Food Nutrition Policy (2013-2018) recommends improving nutrition and food security learning through strengthening the curriculum and extracurricular activities including the use of school gardening.

The European Union Delegation to Rwanda has signed with the Government of Rwanda, the Financing Agreement to support the decentralized agriculture (RW/FED/2009/021-572) and Rwanda's national multi sectoral strategy to eliminate malnutrition (FED/2013/024-780), for the period of 2009-2017; hence, the kitchen and school garden programs will be evaluated as they were among the performance indicators of these financing agreements.

The main objectives of this evaluation are to provide the relevant services of the European Union, the Government of Rwanda and, interested stakeholders with:

• an overall independent assessment of the past performance of the kitchen and school garden program in Rwanda from 2010 up to 2017, paying particular attention to its results measured against its objectives;
• key lessons and recommendations in order to improve current (if relevant) and future Actions.

In particular, this evaluation will serve in better understanding the impact and challenges met in developing kitchen gardens as well as concrete recommendations to move forward the program. It will also inform the EU on its Budget Support operations and provide recommendations for the design of future similar interventions and the related policy dialogues.

The evaluation will assess the Action using the five standard DAC evaluation criteria, namely: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability and perspectives of impact. In addition, the evaluation will assess two EU specific evaluation criteria:

• the EU added value (the extent to which the Action adds benefits to what would have resulted from Member States' interventions only);
• the coherence of the Action itself, with the EU strategy in Rwanda and with other EU policies and Member State Actions, and other donors.

The evaluation team shall furthermore consider whether the following cross-cutting issues: gender equality, children's rights and marginalised peoples and environmental sustainability were taken into account in the identification/formulation documents and the extent to which they have been reflected in the implementation of the Action and its monitoring.

• University –or postgraduate degree in agronomy, rural development, agricultural sciences, horticulture, nutrition, public health, statistics, or any other subject closely related to the scope of the requested services.
• Proven English language report writing and communication skills.

Professional experience of the team

Minimum requirements:

• At least 8 years of professional experience in program evaluation related to nutrition, food security or health; and/or
• At least 6 years of professional experience related to the design, monitoring or implementation of household food production systems programmes; and/or
• At least 8 years of professional experience in designing and conducting surveys and computing data according to international statistical standards in the field of nutrition, food security or health; and/or
• At least 6 years of professional experience in gender analysis.

Preferred requirements of the team:

• Proven experience in statistics and surveys related to nutrition;
• Proven experience in evaluation of nutrition programmes;
• Proficiency in French;
• Successful professional experience in implementing kitchen garden or school garden programmes.