A Story That Keeps Growing: Carrying Global CFaH Learnings to a New Generation
As the final phase of the Global CFaH Project unfolds, one of the most important questions at this stage has moved beyond how the project ends and now asks "what continues afterwards?"
In Palawan, Philippines, the answer is presenting itself across classrooms, day care centres, and community institutions. Maningning ang Hardin is a children’s storybook that was developed as one of the project’s final dissemination and legacy resources. Global CFaH partners in Palawan visit elementary schools, share the story across day care centres and barangay local government units, and impart project learnings to children and families to foster sustained impact.
Maningning ang Hardin: A Palawan story, rooted in lived experience
At the centre of Maningning ang Hardin is Ningning, a young girl from Puerto Princesa City. This story is inspired by a family’s experience participating in Global CFaH Project interventions, where they learned about healthier nutrition habits and home food production. The changes this family implemented at home shaped Ningning’s story. Translating these learnings into a children’s book creates an opportunity for these rich lessons to travel beyond one household and across the local community. Children can engage with food production, nutrition, and community resilience through storytelling and relatability, rather than research findings or technical guidance alone. The aim of Maningning ang Hardin is simple: to help young readers see how small choices around food and food production can support healthier lives at home.
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Returning knowledge to communities
Over the last few years, Global CFaH has upheld the central principle that research doesn’t end with data collection, academic publications, or reports, and recognises that its value also lies in how learnings are returned to communities to be transformed into tangible action for sustainable impact and improved livelihoods. In Palawan, Global CFaH partners have worked with communities and local stakeholders on agroecological crop cultivation, nutrition, healthy cooking, food preservation, and other approaches connecting food production with household health. The project has also created spaces for learning exchanges between researchers and community members, connecting formal research with local realities. Intentional engagement with children through Maningning ang Hardin extends this work into multigenerational learning. Placing the book in schools, day care centres and barangay institutions creates opportunity for collective learning for children and their families in shared community spaces.
A resource designed to outlive the project
Across Fiji, Palawan, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines, teams are now consolidating a wider body of legacy materials intended to support future food systems work with the common goal of increasing community-based food production to improve household diets, nutrition, and food security, while also reducing the incidence of nutrition-related diseases. The project’s legacy materials include a Global CFaH toolkit, community and policy resources, practical intervention materials, training resources, research methods and child-friendly resources addressing food, gardening, nutrition and the environment. These outputs ensure the project’s legacy goes beyond a final event or report and also takes the form of resources, knowledge, relationships and practical tools that contribute to the ongoing resilience of local communities through generations.
Aligned with efforts to make project legacy materials accessible, A digital edition of Maningning ang Hardin is also being prepared for free public access, allowing more schools, families and communities to read and share Ningning’s story.
Every story can carry something forward
Data is an invaluable resource that supports learning, action and measures change. But impact also lives within communities, through practices taught by families, knowledge shared between neighbours, and sometimes, through a storybook placed in a child’s hands.