Evaluation report of the effectiveness of the Ziron Pulse Nutrition ToolKit

As part of the projecyt ZIRON Pulse: Upscaling adoption and exploitation of a wide diversity of Iron and Zinc-rich beans by rural populations in Africa,  mirconutrient deficies were the traget probelem to be addressed. Micronutrient deficiencies are a major public health problem affecting large parts of the world’s population. Biofortification, the process of enhancing the micronutrient content in plants by plant breeding has been proven to fill the nutrient gap, especially in hard-to-reach populations. Biofortified crops are steadily being introduced, and the scale of many biofortification programs is increasing. However, there are still gaps concerning the nutrition and health benefits of biofortified beans including myths and misconceptions that hinder their utilization in the community.
The Nutrition toolkit was developed to address these nutrition and health information gaps that had been identified from a formative research that was done in Kiambu, Nyeri and Meru counties of Kenya.   The evaluation was conducted using Focus group discussions (FGD) and in-depth interviews to collect information related to knowledge, attitude, and practices on biofortified beans, and bean processing
methods adopted by the communities, sources of information on biofortified beans, availability of biofortified beans, recipes tried at home, barriers to biofortified bean consumption and what consumers like most about biofortified beans. This information was gathered in order to evaluate the performance of the nutrition toolkit in terms of addressing gaps identified in formative research. 
Structured interview data collection was conducted using tablet computers and open data kit (ODK) software.  FGD data was recorded, transcribed, coded and summarized into themes.