So what did I accomplish?

Yesterday I had my final meeting at work to hand over my last output and plan for the future. It was a good time to reflect on what, exactly, I accomplished in four months volunteering for Fabretto.

As a first priority, I created an Excel workbook that compiled the nutritional content of various typical Nicaraguan foods. By entering the quantity, in grams, of each one of these ingredients, you could see what percent of daily nutritional requirements were covered in total, as well as how much it cost.

From this tool, I made a list of raw ingredients that would best provide 40-50% of all required calories, vitamins and minerals while keeping to our budget of $0.30 per kid per day. I used this list to then build a 2 week menu of 10 nutritious, typical Nicaraguan plates, including vegetable and chicken soup, scrambled eggs, burritos, Indio Viejo (a stew), and Arroz a la Valenciana (a rice dish with chicken and tomato).

Once we had our final menu, it was time to implement it. I created several files to support this process, including a recipe book, an Excel workbook with the quantities of ingredients needed based on the number of kids eating, and a sheet that pulled together all of these ingredients into a consolidated order.

More importantly, we held a series of orientations and training sessions with cooks, administrators, warehouse managers and other key nutrition program contributors to explain our goals, introduce them to the new menu and teach them how to prepare the meals.

In addition to ensuring a healthy daily meal, the standard menu is also a key first step to centralizing purchasing within the organization. Knowing what each school is serving each week and what ingredients go into those meals allows Fabretto to know, at a macro level, the total amount of each ingredient it uses weekly by region. This information will be critical as negotiations with suppliers continue, because Fabretto should use its high volume as a bargaining chip.

Finally, beyond the menu, I also helped put together some data to give Fabretto a comprehensive view of just how much its nutrition program costs annually. Beyond the $0.30 per child they spend to buy food weekly, there are also costs associated with warehousing and transporting donated food, running the kitchens and administrating the program. This information is important for two reasons. First, Fabretto has recently begun moving toward a school sponsorship model of fundraising where possible. This means that Fabretto looks for donors to sponsor all the costs associated with a whole school, including supplies, salaries, and the lunch program. To know how much it costs to run the nutrition portion of a school, then, Fabretto needs numbers like these. The second use of the cost data is for allocating restricted funding received. If Fabretto gets a donation to cover the nutrition program, it should be able to use those funds to cover the various aspects of the program – not just food but also transportation, labor, etc. Without a clear picture and explanation of those non-food costs, though, this kind of allocation is difficult.

Some people have asked me if I’ve accomplished all I had wanted to at Fabretto, and that’s a hard question to answer. I would say that the projects described above represent about 2/3 of what I set out to do on day one, and that was back when I was only supposed to be here 3 months. However, that was also back when I didn’t quite realize the extent of the task at hand or the [slow] pace at which it would move. Once I readjusted my expectations in light of certain hurdles here in Nicaragua (sometime around February), I would say that my goals were close to that which I actually accomplished. The one project that I would have liked to see further along, however, was that of centralized purchasing. The menu that we’ve created is solid and at a price per child that is close to the budget. However, it does not save Fabretto much if any money over the level they were spending before. The real cost saving opportunities lie in taking the next step and negotiating with a handful of large suppliers for better prices and volume discounts. I would have loved to push those negotiations further than I did, but it became apparent to me early on that composing a list of potential suppliers was no easy task. Without many connections here in Nicaragua, and with few suppliers online, it was hard for me or the other volunteer that I worked with to really make much progress on this front.

The good news on the purchasing, though, is that the new volunteer that is coming in May to work on nutrition will be able to focus on that more than I ever was. With another person pushing along the progress already made, I’m fairly confident that Fabretto will be buying at reduced prices from centralized providers sometime this year.