In the early months of 2025, the future looked bleak for the Tudienzele project, awarded in October 2023 by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA).
Like many other initiatives, dramatic funding cuts forced the food security and resilience project to close its federally funded activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This spring, however, with USAID and BHA now folded into the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Food Security, the five-year, $105.7 million project was reinstated. As one of four sub-partners to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs has resumed its work leading social and behavior change interventions designed to combat deep-rooted poverty and malnutrition in the country.
The DRC faces significant economic and nutritional challenges, particularly in the Kasai Province where crisis-level food insecurity affects thousands of households. Tudienzele addresses food, nutrition, and economic security, seeking to build resilience by providing people with the means necessary to be able to sustain themselves after the project has ended.
Says Didier Mbayi Kangudie, who is leading CCP’s Tudienzele work in the field: “CCP is playing an important role supporting farmers, market actors and other stakeholders with behavioral change interventions aimed at improving food security in the Kasai province.”
The project recognizes that immediate support is crucial to pair with long-term change.
“As we restart our work, we’re focused on helping communities build lasting resilience,” says Shannon McAfee, team lead at CCP. “This project is not only about addressing immediate needs—it’s about equipping people with knowledge, skills, and practices that will carry forward long after Tudienzele ends.”
A participative stakeholder-led behavior prioritization process overseen by CCP resulted in the identification of 17 priority behaviors to be targeted to increase success across the project’s main implementation sectors – finance, enterprise growth, agriculture, nutrition and WASH. Formative research conducted by CCP and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health provided key behavioral insights that informed and shaped the development of a tailored social and behavioral change strategy and campaign.
Multiple channels are being used in the campaign to maximize the depth and coverage of consistent, contextually relevant, and locally appropriate messaging to encourage the adoption of agricultural, nutritional and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) best practices and desired priority behaviors: community dialogues and home visits, billboards and posters, radio spots and interactive community radio programs, social media (the project recently launched a Facebook page) and remote area-focused mobile video units.
Of particular importance are partnerships with existing community structures and systems as agents of change. CCP is designing, piloting and scaling up community-driven social and behavior change approaches.
Most of the population in DRC is engaged in farming, though many are unable to grow enough food for commercial purposes.
Among the barriers to growing food for market is many farmers’ lack of access to high-quality seeds that can thrive in the DRC climate and, for many, a lack of knowledge that such seeds exist at all. Tudienzele is working with DRC’s National Seed Service to encourage the uptake of improved and certified seeds.
CCP’s formative research found that only 54 percent of farmers sampled use these certified seeds, which are often perceived to improve crop quality and yield. Meanwhile, just 31 percent of participants use chemical fertilizers, mainly due to lack of local availability and financial means.
Some farmers surveyed have misconceptions about them, believing incorrectly that fertilizers burn the soil or attract pests, says Talata Sawadogo-Lewis, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins who worked on the research.
Kangudie says that Tudienzele is working with communities to improve farming practices, moving them from traditional practices to the adoption of climate-smart ones. One example is an effort to help halt the century-old practice of slash-and-burn agriculture, which consists of leaving vegetation debris on the field post-harvest and burning it, along with overgrown plants in situ, before planting again, rather than removing it.
Misconceptions identified by CCP’s formative research include that this practice helped “clean” and fertilize the soil. However, this practice comes at a significant environmental cost, and when it replaces good soil management practices, such as letting the soil rest and replenish for at least a year before planting again, it can contribute to soil degradation.
Messages will encourage methods that are protective of the soil, including intercropping that is, growing different crops near each other. This allows the soil’s nutrients to replenish themselves rather than becoming depleted and unusable which could in turn force farmers to cut down forests to find new, arable land to replace what they lose to degradation.
Recently, the Tudienzele project organized a training workshop with the Ministry of Fishery and Livestock to address barriers to fish farming. “Despite so many rivers in the province, there is almost no fish farming,” Kangudie says. “There are so many opportunities to grow fish both for subsistence and commercial production.”
The catalytic role of Tudienzele in generating behavioral shift was illustrated by the fact that many participants in the workshop did not know that the ministry has a center devoted to demonstration of aquacultural best practices and to supporting community initiatives in fish farming. To that end, Tudienzele facilitated an interactive radio program with a governmental subject matter expert where farmers and community members called in to ask questions and get more information.
The program highlighted the dual benefits of fishponds: improving access to protein-rich food – particularly for children —and creating opportunities for household-level income generation.
While distributing food to the most vulnerable people is part of the Tudienzele project, the goal is really to empower communities to become self-sufficient in the long run.
“Tudienzele is about building resilience and preparing communities to be better equipped for the future,” Kangudie says.
