Small-scale poultry farming is a major source of income for many rural households in Kenya and contributes to household food security and nutrition. However, preventing transmission of foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella and Campylobacter is a persistent challenge in poultry production systems around the world. Strengthening food safety requires not only the adoption of safer handling practices but also aligning those interventions with gender roles, responsibilities, and risks. A new study highlights the significant role played by women and youth in small-scale poultry production in Kenya and identifies key activities to increase their success in reducing foodborne illness.

The team, led by Barbara Kowalcyk, associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology at The Ohio State University (OSU), analyzed findings on gender roles and youth participation in Kenyan poultry production. The trends in gender roles and youth participation will be used to develop culture- and gender-specific food safety practices to reduce foodborne disease risks as part of the Chakula Salama project funded by USAID’s  Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

“This review provides a unique perspective on how women, youth, and men can have differing levels of exposure to food safety concerns on smallholder farms in Kenya due to the specific tasks that they conduct in the poultry value chain,” said lead author Ariel Garsow, an alumna of the Kowalcyk Lab at OSU now serving as a technical specialist in food safety with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition’s USAID-funded EatSafe program. “Other articles or reports mainly cover exposure risks or roles in the value chain, but this review provides a synthesis of how these topics overlap.”

Transmission of foodborne disease can occur at many points in the poultry value chain, from the risk of contact with foodborne pathogens from water, poultry feed, or chickens during production to the consumption of contaminated poultry products at meals. Key findings of the review include:

• Women and youth play central roles in smallholder poultry production
• Women are primarily responsible for the care and keeping of chickens, including the cleaning of poultry houses, feeding, and treating illnesses
• Women spend more time engaged in daily activities around poultry production than men, especially when flocks are smaller than 500 chickens
• Men, women, and youth are all involved in poultry processing, transportation, and consumption

Gender and youth roles in poultry farming impact public health in two ways. A poultry farmer’s personal risk of foodborne illness is directly affected by the specific role they play in production, with women and youth facing a higher risk from daily involvement with animal husbandry including exposure to manure when cleaning pens. In addition, the greater participation of women and youth within poultry production provides vital opportunities for them to prevent foodborne pathogens from reaching consumers.

The review also examined who controls the income generated by smallholder poultry farming. Typically, women own chickens when flocks are small. However, when flock sizes on smallholder farms increase to the point where they have the potential for commercial viability, men usually take over and control the income.

“There’s data to indicate that if the woman is much more involved in either decision-making or the control of the income, it benefits the family a lot more,” said Kathleen Colverson,

associate research scientist at the University of Florida and gender lead for the project. “So, what we’re also concerned about is how can we not only reduce pathogen load but find potential mechanisms for helping the women to control more of the income that’s generated.”

Because of the central roles played by women and youth in poultry production, the authors recommend key activities to bolster their success in safer poultry production, including  trainings on hygienic practices that target women and youth—but are sensitive to their available time and locations, providing financial support to women and youth, empowering women’s decision making in poultry sales, and addressing within-household inequities in chicken and egg consumption. In addition, they cite the need for policies to support gender and youth empowerment and greater inclusion of the perspectives of women and youth in the development of food safety priorities and approaches.

Garsow says findings from the review are being used to help design culturally-appropriate, gender-specific interventions to mitigate risks of Salmonella enterica and Campylobacter spp. for Kenyan consumers through the Chakula Salama project.

“More research is needed to determine connections between foodborne disease and who conducts the particular activity in the poultry value chain,” said Garsow. “Overlaying information on how women, men, and youth are involved in the poultry value chain in Kenya  with  food safety risks provides evidence of where and to whom interventions should be focused.”

In addition to Garsow, Colverson, and Kowalcyk, co-authors include Erika G. Kim (OSU); Sanja Illic (OSU); Catherine Kunyanga (University of Nairobi); and Abdiaziz Bainah (University of Nairobi). The review was published in the December 2, 2022, issue of Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

Christina Frank is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Growing up in Ethiopia, Woubit Abebe (formerly Abdela) had always been a star student and, as a result, found herself with several possible career paths open to her. She had only one requirement for her future job: She would apply her knowledge to help others in whatever way she could.

“Whatever I do, I do it to the best of my ability. In a way, I could have done anything,” says Abebe, professor in the Department of Pathobiology at Tuskegee University in Alabama. “I could have been — I don’t know, I would have loved to be an astronaut. I would have loved to be a medical doctor.”

In the end, Abebe chose veterinary medicine, and she’s leveraged it into a career of helping combat the spread of some of the world’s deadliest foodborne pathogens.

She currently serves as director of Tuskegee University’s Center for Food Animal Health, Food Safety, and Food Defense (CFAFSD), which conducts cutting-edge research in farm animal health, epidemic diseases of livestock that threaten global food security including diseases which spread from animals to humans (zoonoses), and pre-/post-harvest food safety. The center closely collaborates with state-level departments to develop opportunities for the advancement of agricultural food safety in Alabama.

Her research focuses on creating rapid pathogen detection tools that employ real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the same technique used for COVID-19 testing. In 2014, she developed and patented a detection platform array that simultaneously identifies 12 different high-priority pathogens — from Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica to Yersinia pestis and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis — in samples of food items including meat, milk, and vegetables.

Since then, Abebe has been working on expanding the testing capacity for additional biological threats. Recently, her laboratory designed an assay for the rapid and accurate detection of over 23 Salmonella serovars of particular interest to public health, which may be carried in food or water supplies.

“Obviously, nobody wants to eat contaminated food or have a sickness — and globally foodborne illness costs a lot, billions of dollars in terms of hospitalizations and other expenses,” she says. “My overarching goal literally is to detect all pathogens in one assay, if I can.”

Abebe also serves as co-principal investigator for an ongoing project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety, titled “Food safety capacity building in Senegal: Enhancing resilience of the dairy value chain by leveraging public-private partnerships.” Dairy production in Senegal is a rapidly growing sector, but it relies on a diverse and fragmented supply chain of individual small farms, aggregation centers, artisanal processing facilities, and transport without refrigeration, creating a challenging situation for food safety.

The project aims to improve food safety across the dairy value chain through multiple approaches, including raising awareness of food safety issues and their impact on public health, conducting research-based food safety training programs, and identifying practical food safety interventions. It will also integrate gender research and training strategies to support women dairy operators, who play important roles in milk and dairy production and sales. Mentoring students in Senegal is one of Abebe’s roles in the project.

“I have mentored a master’s student in Senegal who drafted a literature review of dairy pathogens in Senegal, and I’m currently working with students on conducting surveys on hygienic practices in Senegalese milk and dairy chain to identify risks associated with existing production systems and milk-borne illnesses. Sebsequently we will have students working in the lab to identify the presence of major pathogens,” Abebe says. “Of course, Senegal is a different story than the U.S. They face very important challenges: Pathogens that are not really an issue here are still an issue over there.”

One of her goals within the project is to prepare the laboratory at Senegal’s Institut de Technologie Alimentaire (ITA) to analyze milk samples for pathogens like Brucella, Salmonella, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This project will potentially use the two patented detection platforms developed by Dr. Abebe`s laboratry. The project, currently in its third year, is led by Manpreet Singh of the University of Georgia with collaborators at three Senegalese institutions: ITA, Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles, and Conseil National du Développement de la Nutrition.

Abebe’s career path started with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree from Addis Ababa University in 2000. She then left her home country on a full scholarship to complete her master’s and Ph.D. at the Institut National Polytechnique De Toulouse in France. Abebe then secured a faculty position in the Department of Pathobiology at Tuskeegee University, where she has used genome sequence analysis of pathogens to identify target regions to use in diagnostic tools. In addition to pathogen detection tools, her research spans novel vaccine development, testing of biodegradable packaging materials to limit food contamination in stores, as well as livestock and environmental assessments to determine the sources of major foodborne pathogens to curtail preharvest food contamination.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is study these pathogens within the farm level. If we can identify an animal husbandry system associated with less shedding of bacteria, we can work on preventing contamination right on the field level,” says Abebe. “So if we can reduce that burden, I think that will play an important role in the assurance of the safety of food.”

Meeri Kim is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Aditya Khanal originally hails from a pocket of Nepal where citrus — in particular, mandarins and sweet oranges — grew plentifully. As a young boy on his grandfather’s farm, he remembers the local producers having a surplus of fruit but lacking the proper channels to sell it outside their small village.

Witnessing as a child that lost earning potential and its repercussions for the farmers’ families had a lasting effect on him. It was then that Khanal first recognized the importance of market connections in the world of agriculture. Today, he works as an agricultural and applied economist who studies the complex interplay between producers and consumers.

“My family wanted me to be a medical doctor, but I realized that food and agri-food systems have no less scope than medicine,” says Khanal, who serves as an associate professor in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Tennessee State University. “Ultimately, food is related to public health and nutrition.”

His research primarily focuses on agricultural finance and risk management of farm households in both the United States and Nepal. On the producer side, he investigates factors that influence farm households’ decisions about topics including diversification, technology adoption, government programs, and food safety. And on the consumer side, he examines the drivers of food demand and consumer behavior.

His recent studies have explored why and how enterprises like agritourism could benefit small U.S. farms, how credit constraint affects small U.S. farm’s performance, the willingness of citrus farmers in Nepal to pay for crop insurance, and whether precision farming with a GPS guidance system met cotton producers’ expectations.

“As an applied economist, I’m interested in the practices that would help both farmers and consumers,” he says. “I try to investigate their decision-making behavior, and then analyze and quantify how that decision is related to the impacts on outcomes like food security, incomes, and economic status.”

Khanal is currently leading a project titled “Market-led food safety in Nepal: Harnessing production incentives and consumer awareness,” funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety. Food safety is an emerging priority in Nepal, where there have been limitations in designing and enforcing strict food production policy regulations. The prevalence of foodborne pathogens like E. coli and Salmonella remains a critical problem, particularly in fresh produce, frequently leading to illness in both adults and children.

At the same time, inadequate food consumption and low dietary diversity contribute to undernutrition in Nepali households. Increasing access to nutrient-dense foods, including salad vegetables typically consumed raw, can remedy this issue — but only if the high risk of foodborne illness is eliminated.

The two-year project aims to stimulate a rapid increase in access to nutritious produce in Nepal by identifying the factors that will drive the supply and demand of safer salad vegetables. The hope is that determining the current barriers to produce safety will serve as a foundation for strategic policies and investment to transform the vegetable value chain.

Khanal and colleagues at Arizona State University, Nepal’s Agriculture and Forestry University, and SAHAVAGI have already completed the first part of the study: surveying consumers about their food safety awareness and willingness to pay for safer produce. They now plan to shift focus to the growers, collecting data on their current food safety practices and willingness to take on additional costs for a safer product.

“For the parties involved in every food system to anticipate economic sustainability, there should be some incentives for everyone,” says Khanal. “So, I try to do research on how best we can incentivize different economic agents. This project is about understanding the drivers for the adoption of safer practices among growers, as well as the consumer consciousness and their willingness to pay for food safety.”

The team will also provide food safety and health hazard reduction training to small- and medium-sized vegetable farms, specifically targeting youth and women entrepreneurs. The project will culminate in a stakeholder workshop with government officials and private businesses on prioritizing food safety strategies and informed investment decisions.

Khalan’s path to applied economics began with an undergraduate degree in agricultural sciences at Nepal’s Tribhuvan University in 2006. He then attended Louisiana State University (LSU) for master’s and Ph.D. degrees in agricultural economics. He also received a master’s degree in finance from LSU and another in economics from Virginia Tech. After his Ph.D., he started a tenure-track faculty position at Tennessee State University.

Despite living in the U.S. for almost 15 years now, Khanal maintains strong connections to his home country. He frequently visits Nepal to conduct research and present at conferences, while also keeping in close touch with family members, former classmates, and colleagues. Ultimately, the goal of his research is to find and implement strategies across the food system that will benefit all involved parties and promote safer food production and consumption.

“What I love is impact-oriented research. For me, an equally important aspect in research is to communicate and publish so that others can apply the findings,” says Khanal. “In the end, science should have some meaningful effect on stakeholders like the farmers and consumers. That’s my philosophy.”

Meeri Kim is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Those of us at the consumer end of the food production chain don’t necessarily think about food safety much. Sure, we know to cook chicken thoroughly and never let potato salad sit out too long in the heat. We read the occasional news story about a foodborne illness outbreak and remind ourselves to wash our lettuce and scrub our cantaloupes extra carefully.

But the overall, exceptional safety of our food supply comes thanks to hard work, research, data analysis, education and outreach by people all along the food production chain. At Purdue, food safety researchers are deeply involved in this process at every step. Their work helps ensure that the chicken on our plates, the herbs in our spice racks and the milk in our children’s glasses won’t make us sick.

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Categorizing Purdue University animal science graduate student Leah Thompson is a challenging proposition.

“I joke that I’m grossly mislabeled, because I’m an animal scientist working on a project in Cambodia that is all about vegetables,” she says.

Furthermore, her role in that project largely focuses on understanding women’s roles, knowledge and attitudes about food safety. This pivot was spurred by an offer from Purdue Professor of Animal Sciences—and her former undergraduate advisor—Paul Ebner to return to Purdue to pursue a Ph.D. focused on international food safety research and outreach. Ebner had recently been named co-Principal Investigator (PI) on a project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) to reduce foodborne illness spread by vegetables sold through traditional markets in Cambodia.

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When Purdue professor of animal sciences, Paul Ebner, reviews data from his team’s surveys of food safety knowledge and attitudes in Cambodia, his first priority is using the results to develop effective food safety outreach activities for vegetable farmers, distributors, and vendors. However, because his project is supported by federal funding, he is also required to comply with mandates for open and accessible data. These federal directives aim to provide evidence for scientists and decision-makers around the world and fuel entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific discovery.

Ebner’s project is one of six supported by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL), based at Purdue University and Cornell University. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the projects address policies and practices to reduce the burden of foodborne disease and malnutrition in target Feed the Future countries.

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An international, multidisciplinary research team has launched a new project to improve the safety of fresh produce in Nepal by harnessing market-based approaches that integrate consumer and producer studies.

With a policy focus that prioritized food security and government investments in related areas, Nepal has experienced relatively higher productivity of some agricultural crops and lower poverty rates. Yet, 36% of children under five years old are chronically malnourished, and food production is only one side of the equation, says Aditya Khanal, associate professor of agricultural economics at Tennessee State University (TSU) and principal investigator (PI) on the new study funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL).

“You can have enough food for people to eat, but if it’s not delivering its full nutritional value by causing foodborne illness, then that supply of food isn’t meeting the real needs,” Khanal says.

Although supermarkets are becoming more common in Southeast Asia, most consumers still buy vegetables from local growers and street vendors, or even from neighbors. As produce travels from field to market, it is susceptible to picking up and transmitting foodborne diseases. Consumers take on the risk without labels or guarantees, especially for vegetables eaten raw, says Ashok Mishra, co-PI and the Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation chair in food management in the Morrison School of Agribusiness at Arizona State University.

Foodborne pathogens can be introduced onto fresh vegetables at any point during production, harvest, handling and packing, and preventing foodborne disease requires growers to exercise food safety practices, known as Good Agricultural Practices (GAPS), on their farms. Agnes Kilonzo-Nthenge, the team’s food safety expert and professor at TSU, says small-scale farmers are often not aware of risk factors on their farms, and therefore, food safety education and outreach are critically needed to persuade produce growers to adopt practices to avoid and reduce foodborne pathogens in their farm products. She notes that safer, fresh produce is possible with the use of a few strategic GAPS practices: hand washing, using aged rather than fresh manure, planting produce upwind and upstream from animal wastes, using clean and disinfected buckets for harvesting and testing for indicators of contamination.

This new research project is designed to address production challenges as well as the complexity inherent in trying to create systemic change in food safety behavior. As economists, Khanal and Mishra know that knowledge and awareness aren’t enough: this is where markets come in.

“We want to drive demand and supply for safer produce from both ends,” Khanal says. “To do that, we’re looking at the grower and consumer sides to create a two-way feedback mechanism that reinforces and increases food safety in Nepal’s fresh vegetable production.”

Researchers will start by surveying Nepali vegetable growers and consumers to assess the risk of foodborne disease in their households. With in-country lead and co-PI Ram Hari Timilsina, assistant professor at Nepal’s Agriculture and Forestry University (AFU), they will determine the baseline level of awareness about food safety and contamination in fresh produce, as well as if consumers are willing to pay more for produce handled using basic food safety principles.

Using this data, Mishra and Khanal can statistically model outcomes, such as whether food safety practices would generate higher income and financial security for small farmers. Those analyses can then help Nepali entrepreneurs and policymakers reach informed decisions on prioritizing food safety investments. In the study’s second year, researchers — including team members from AFU — will bring preliminary findings to key stakeholders by conducting food safety workshops for government institutions, universities and youth and female small-scale farmers.

Why start by training youth and women? Sramika Rijal, the team’s gender specialist and an assistant professor at AFU, says that over 74% of Nepali women are employed in agriculture — the majority in subsistence farming. Traditionally, Nepali women also have overseen the household food shopping and cooking. With this study, Rijal says they want to understand how gender roles and demographics contribute to vegetable production, consumption and status. They will also test the assumption that younger consumers tend to be more interested in and cautious about food safety.

“Ultimately, we want to equip youth and women in agriculture to participate in sustainable, safer food production and entrepreneurship,” says Rijal.

With this market-led approach, Khanal and his team aim to provide Nepali stakeholders with an evidence-based guide to incentivizing rapid changes in on-farm food safety. Because, whether policymaker or farmer, everybody is a potential consumer.

“Farmers are the starting point for food production,” says Khanal. “If we start there with these efforts, it will multiply down the chain.”

Sarah Thompson is a freelance writer for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

While he now calls the state of Texas home, Madan Dey has roots in rural Bangladesh, where he grew up on the family farm. It was a small-scale operation that mainly produced rice, along with some fish and dairy. As a young boy, he witnessed firsthand his father, uncle and other relatives navigate the many challenges of running an agricultural business.

Today, as an agricultural economist, he performs experiments and analyses to better understand consumer behavior, which at first glance seems far removed from farming life. Yet, the heart of Dey’s work — to improve the livelihood of farmers around the world — can be traced back to his upbringing.

“I don’t like to do research for the sake of research. I like to do research that will help the stakeholder,” says Dey, professor of agricultural business and economics and chair of the Department of Agricultural Sciences at Texas State University. “I know the real pain of farming, so I try to help farmers.”

In layman’s terms, Dey peers into the minds of consumers to find out which attributes they value when it comes to the food they purchase. For example, are consumers in a given country willing to pay more for fish with lower levels of antibiotic residues, heavy metals or harmful microbes? If so, how much more? This information may then be passed down to farmers, who can decide whether to integrate agricultural practices that will produce a higher quality, safer product.

Although his current research spans regions in both Bangladesh and the United States, Dey notes that market research is most vital for developing countries where adoption of agricultural technology is a daunting — and often costly — new prospect.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years, the overall economic condition of consumers in Bangladesh has been improving. The country is in a situation where overall food shortage is not an issue,” he says. “When I grew up there, availability of food was the primary concern. Once we fulfill the basic need, consumers are now willing to pay for better products.”

Consumers have become more health-conscious, and issues of food safety and quality are now much greater concerns than in the past. Also, now that the domestic demand is met, developing countries like Bangladesh are considering the export of goods to the United States and Europe. Exported fish, for instance, needs to meet certain health and safety standards that would require farmers and processors to bear additional expenses.

“In order to produce a better quality, safer product, in general, farmers need to pay higher production costs. Fish production needs better water quality and feed, which costs more money,” says Dey. “So scientists might be able to suggest stringent food safety protocols, but if consumers are not interested in paying for those higher quality or safer attributes, those technologies would not be adopted by farmers.”

Currently, Dey serves as principal investigator for a project titled, “Enhancing food safety in fish and chicken value chains of Bangladesh,” funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety. To reduce the food safety hazards associated with fish and chicken in the markets of Bangladesh, Dey and his colleagues are evaluating consumers’ willingness to pay for safe foods. What consumers are willing to pay, in turn, affects whether farmers will adopt the food safety practices or not.

The multidisciplinary project involves not only economists like Dey, but also microbiologists, food scientists and sociologists. Results and data from this study will support science-based decisions on the most effective methods to reduce food safety hazards, all while taking the farmers and their profits into consideration. The findings will inform win-win policy recommendations that can help reduce consumers’ exposure to harmful microorganisms and chemicals.

Dey chose to pursue agricultural economics as an undergraduate at Bangladesh Agricultural University — a decision he attributes to a combination of his upbringing on the farm, interest in mathematics and the school’s proximity to his home. After graduating in 1982, he began his doctoral work on the economics of agricultural development, focusing on rice at the University of the Philippines Los Baños in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). He continued on at IRRI as a postdoctoral researcher studying the agricultural economy of Asia under the mentorship of the late Professor Robert Evenson at Yale University and the late Dr. Mahabub Hossain at IRRI.

Later, he shifted from rice to aquatic food systems as a scientist-turned-regional director at WorldFish, an international nonprofit research institution that aims to enhance food security by improving fisheries and aquaculture. After 13 years there, initially in the Philippines and then in Malaysia, Dey moved to the United States to become a professor of agricultural economics. In 2016, he joined the faculty at Texas State University, where he also serves as chair of the Department of Agricultural Sciences. He is also an Asia specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish.

Despite living so far from Bangladesh, Dey maintains close ties to his home country through his work. The project funded by the Innovation Lab for Food Safety includes collaborations with researchers at his alma mater, Bangladesh Agricultural University, as well as the University of Dhaka and the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. He prides himself on being able to give back in the form of improved food safety strategies and policies.

“With excellent economic growth, consumers in Bangladesh are now looking into the issue of whether they can afford a higher quality product. They think about whether the food they offer their children is free from chemical residues or pathogenic bacteria,” says Dey. “From that point of view, we need to help the government — as well as the consumer and the producer — fulfill this need.”

Meeri Kim is a freelance writer with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Progress in food safety can stumble in the final mile: innovations to reduce the risk of foodborne illness are only effective if people are willing and able to adopt them. Social science tools can help fill this “implementation gap,” enabling researchers to understand the incentives and barriers to the adoption of new food safety practices. A recent course on research methods for gender-sensitive surveys, interviews and focus groups has equipped a cohort in Cambodia to help bridge the implementation gap in a vegetable food safety project funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

“When it comes down to it, improving food safety on an individual level, or a community level, requires someone to change or adapt their behavior,” said project co-principal investigator (PI) Paul Ebner, a professor of animal science at Purdue University. “Facilitating such behavior change requires a lot of people who are versed in social sciences.”

Social science research skills were the focus of the virtual, five-week course on Qualitative Research Methods. Taught by researchers at the Royal University of Agriculture (RUA) in Cambodia and Purdue University in the United States, the course had 48 participants. It was offered as part of a four-year project to strengthen the food safety of fresh vegetables in Cambodia, led by Ebner and co-PI Jessie Vipham, associate professor of animal sciences and industry at Kansas State University. While their immediate goal was to train and recruit enumerators to support the project’s food safety research, the online format enabled the participation of students from other institutions, as well as agriculture professionals like Panha Suon, who works with the Cambodian Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture.

“Realizing that qualitative research goes beyond just telling what happens, but why something happens, was important to me,” said Suon, who plans to use surveys in ecological agriculture research. “This course helped me acquire the skills and knowledge to create curated and locally-targeted content based on reliable sources and legitimate research methodology.”

The course was designed by Leah Thompson, a Ph.D. student at Purdue, along with Sreymom Sieng, the project’s gender expert. Over 10 sessions, the class introduced the fundamentals of qualitative research before delving into behavior change theory, feminist theory, research methodologies, creating interviews, understanding attitudes and perceptions using focus groups, and coding and analyzing data.

“During the course, participants expressed a lot of interest in each method, and through the assignments that were provided every week, they had the opportunity to practice what they learned,” said Sieng.

Key skills practiced through the assignments included developing and providing feedback on interview questions, assessing objectivity and taking field notes. Students could further explore ideas through lively, online discussions.

“I learned so much from the course, but my favorite activity was the observation assignment,” said Lak Sivcheng, who holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia. “Observation is very important in research; data collectors need to note a respondent’s response, behavior and situation. I especially valued learning about the gender-based approaches because women play an important role in social development and decision-making.”

Participants not only received a course completion certificate from Purdue University, but they also had the option to earn an internationally recognized certification to conduct human subjects research from the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI).

“When you are conducting research that involves people, ethics and the use of proper procedures are both critical,” said Thompson. “It comes down to protecting people participating in the research. How do you minimize the risk to participants? How do you protect the information they share? Completing CITI certification helps to ensure the students are qualified to use best practices when conducting this type of research.”

CITI certification was important because Thompson and colleagues conceived the course as an opportunity for engaged learning: participants who successfully completed the course can take part in the project’s gender analysis data collection this summer and fall. Through surveys, interviews and focus groups, the team will identify current practices and perceptions of food safety to inform the design of food safety interventions for the vegetable value chain.

“I liked that this course is not just an online course, but it has a hands-on, active research project,” said Suon, who plans to participate in the project research. “We will get out in the field to survey vegetable sellers, and it will allow us to experience some of the stages of real research, such as interviewing, interpreting and transcribing, and hopefully data analyzing.”

Other participants plan to implement qualitative methods in their own research projects. For Ratha Hem, a student and a technical specialist with the Sustainable Assets for Agriculture Markets, Business and Trade (SAAMBAT) project, the course was timely.

“I was really interested in learning feminist theory, behavior change theory using the behavior change wheel and the COM-B model for behavior change [Capability, Opportunity, Motivation: Behavior], and gender analysis,” said Ratha Hem. “I plan to apply what I learned when I will conduct quantitative surveys, qualitative semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with SAAMBAT’s project beneficiaries.”

This is the third research methods course the project has offered in Cambodia. In 2021, two companion courses focusing on quantitative research methods trained and certified close to 200 undergraduates from the Royal University of Agriculture and the Institute of Technology Cambodia in developing surveys and conducting human subjects research. In those courses, students learned the theory and practice of developing questions for surveys, as well as how to pilot and test surveys for reliability and validity. The resulting surveys developed through the courses have been used to measure food safety knowledge and practices among vegetable vendors in Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Battambang.

The courses are key steps in strengthening social science and gender-responsive research capacity in Cambodia. For Thompson, raising awareness of gender-informed research methods was one of the most satisfying aspects of teaching the course.

“It’s critical that people, like myself, who come from STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] backgrounds understand that there is a science to understanding gender research,” said Thompson. “It’s important in international development, and it was great to see our students getting an understanding of the 10,000-foot view of what gender research is. I could see them connecting the dots and seeing how integral gender is to the work we do.”

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.

Poultry production systems worldwide are vulnerable to contamination with bacterial pathogens, such as non-typhoidal Salmonella, which is the leading cause of death from foodborne disease in Africa. Research grounded in locally led decision-making about priorities will be better positioned to generate sustainable, scalable food safety solutions. Leveraging this approach, a team of Kenya- and U.S.-based researchers held a risk ranking workshop in March, engaging female smallholder farmers in Kenya in prioritizing food safety interventions for rigorous evaluation.

“People will always need poultry as a locally, readily available source of protein,” said Robert Onsare, senior research scientist at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety. “But because chicken is often produced and processed in informal settings which rarely include pathogen mitigation strategies, it can be a high-risk value chain.”

Researchers with the Chakula Salama project, which means “safe food” in Swahili, are using the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Guide to Ranking Food Safety Risks at the National Level to set the course for their food safety research and outreach. The guide, released in 2020, was designed to help decision-makers rank the public health risk posed by foodborne hazards in their countries. This spring, the Chakula Salama team used the framework in a risk ranking workshop with stakeholders from Kiambu County, Kenya.

A values-driven process

“A lot of food safety decisions are made in an ad hoc or reactive manner, so the main benefit of the risk ranking exercise is that it helps focus on the biggest priorities,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, the project’s principal investigator and associate professor of food science and technology at The Ohio State University. “We rank the risks based on public health impact but then prioritize those based on the stakeholder community input — you can think of it as using community values to decide where research should focus next.”

The risk ranking workshop was held over three days at KEMRI in March 2022. During the workshop, project researchers introduced the concept and process of risk ranking and explained potential interventions to reduce the risk of foodborne disease. The farmers and local veterinary experts then gathered in breakout groups to discuss and rank risks — including those posed by contamination with Salmonella and Campylobacter bacteria — as well as potential food safety interventions. Groups undertook an iterative process of review, reconsideration and revision until day three, when a consensus about the highest food safety priorities emerged.

“The facilitators were essential to draw out conversation and help people get comfortable in their group,” noted program manager Janet Buffer, who observed the session. “Although each day you could see progress was being made, it could feel very messy. It could feel very uncomfortable. And then boom, you’ve got a result.”

Risk reduction, accessibility, acceptability and affordability

The group identified changes in the handling of carcasses and training on food safety practices before and after slaughter as priorities for interventions. The decision was guided by the group’s assessment and ranking of their shared values.

“The group reached consensus that reducing risks to human health was the most important value because it protects the consumer,” said Onsare. “Accessibility to the farmers and acceptability to the consumer were ranked as second important, and affordability was ranked third, because the intervention has to have some economic sense.”

Workshop participant Sharon Wanjiru, who has been farming broiler birds with her mother for eight years, found the workshop and interactions to be an effective learning environment.

“The workshop created room for interaction by our groupings to reach solutions with different people from different areas, hence new knowledge was gained on my side,” said Wanjiru, who is currently raising 4,000 boilers and 750 chickens for egg laying. “I also learned the importance of preslaughter and post-slaughter procedures on producing safe food for consumers.”

Strengthening capacity and connections

Students from KEMRI, the University of Nairobi and The Ohio State University were present to observe and support the workshop. For most, it was their first opportunity to see risk ranking in action, building knowledge and capacity for this approach in the next generation of food safety researchers.

“The whole process was amazing, educational and interactive,” said Abdiaziz Bainah, a Ph.D. candidate in food safety and quality at the University of Nairobi with Dr. Catherine Kunyanga. “I learned a lot about risk ranking and prioritization, and it was fascinating to interact with the farmers, seeing their understanding of risk and insights into the likely challenges to addressing each identified risk.”

Noel Kambi, who is currently pursuing a master’s degree in medical micro with Dr. Onsare at KEMRI, noted the interactions with stakeholders were invaluable to ensuring interventions were practical and, therefore, more sustainable.

“Having worked with farmers for a long time, this was a good opportunity to learn more about them and their farming activities,” she said. “Involving farmers in the risk ranking process was critical, because it allowed them to express their thoughts on the ideas presented, including what is useful and what can be implemented.”

“It was also a good learning opportunity for scientists, experts, stakeholders and farmers because they all exchanged knowledge and opinions based on their expertise,” Kambi added.

Taking action

With the risk ranking workshop complete, the researchers are now turning to filling some data gaps, including assessing levels of Salmonella and Campylobacter in the poultry value chain. In the coming year, the team will be evaluating the effectiveness of the stakeholder-selected intervention strategies, focusing on approaches that are culturally and gender appropriate, practical and scalable. Throughout, a priority for the researchers will be building on the partnership with stakeholders established in the workshop.

“Across the board, the message coming through to us is that stakeholders are tired of being asked to participate in studies and then never getting any information back,” said Kowalcyk. “So, it’s important for us to develop ways to stay connected with all the stakeholders who helped us launch this work.”

Amanda Garris is a communications specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety.