Food hygiene training guide for informal food sector

By Young Samanyika

Malawi, just like any sub-saharan African country, has experienced a rampant growth of food vending in the informal sector. This includes food sold along streets; in bus depots, on open grounds in markets, schools, hospitals and work places.  The rapid growth of food vending has been facilitated by rapid growth of urban populations due to urbanization, coupled with increased urban poverty.  As a result, the informal food vending has fast emerged as a livelihood strategy and source of inexpensive food for many poor households. Informal food vending has also been taken as an important source of employment, particularly for women who are quite often victims of poverty.  Street food is a source of livelihood for people who are unable to establish business for lack of capital.
 

While food vending has been turned into an economic venture in most poor communities and cheap source of food for to most of people undertaking different activities in towns and trading centres of the country, it also poses a very high risk of food borne illnesses and outbreaks especially cholera.
 

The other challenge associated with food vending in Malawi is that there is no restriction as to who should work as a food handler as opposed to the West where it is a requirement that one has to undergo a food handlers training before pick any job as a food handler. This situation result into having food handlers, who are serving the general public but without basic knowledge of the relation of between food borne diseases, food and hygiene. Informal food vending sites often lack the necessary storage, refrigeration, preparation, cooking and serving facilities to prevent food contamination. They also have limited access to clean water and proper sanitary facilities which increases the risk of contamination being passed on to customers.
 

Having realised the danger of this practise, the Ministry of Health (Environmental Health section) with technical and financial assistance from World Health Organisation (WHO), developed training guidelines for informal food sector.  The guidelines are aiming at improving street food safety and hygiene through training of food handlers. The guide has been designed to suit the level of understanding and needs of food handlers from the informal food trade and their stakeholders. As a means of making sure that the guidelines are meeting the intended purpose, a pretesting training was organised in Mulanje district. A group of food handlers from the informal food industry were mobilised and trained using the developed guidelines. The training was very successful and if resources will permit, more food handlers will be trained country wide. This can be an easy task if the food handlers and employers will be willing to contribute towards the cost of training. It is hoped that with more health education, communities will appreciated the importance of undergoing this king of training.
 

The training uses a set of pictures codes depending on the tool being used on a particular training content. The tools ensure that the training is participatory in nature. The tools are used in small groups of 5 to 8 persons to stimulate and facilitate participation.

The Guideline has the following areas: The background that generally outline the common food-borne illness and conditions resulting from the ingestion of food that contains germs; food vending activities being undertaken in the major trading and town centres; description of what is considered as safe food; identification of health problems in the food vending communities; investigating food vending community practices; how diseases and conditions occur in the food vending community;  Finding solutions; and basic Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points (HACCP) in a local context.

Some of the facilitators during the pretesting training were Mr Bosco Kaluwa and Mr Paul Chunga , District Environmental Health Officers for Mulanje and Ntcheu district respectively