Making Healthy Foods Desirable

Every culture has foods that carry meaning far beyond nutrition. In Rwanda, milk has long symbolised prosperity and celebration. Eggs, on the other hand, were something to sell, not something many families thought to feed their young children.

So how do you change the meaning of a food?

We travel to Rwanda to explore the "One Egg per Child, Every Day" campaign, and the broader First Foods Africa initiative. Along the way, we discover why nutrition isn't just about what's available or what people know. It's about identity, emotion, social norms, and even marketing.

Featuring Rowena Merritt (UNICEF), Bhai Shelley (UNICEF Rwanda), and Alice Mwizerwa (Heza Initiative), this episode explores how social marketing techniques normally used to sell junk food were repurposed to make healthy foods desirable; how communities built their own poultry businesses to overcome local barriers; and why lasting behaviour change means creating demand that can outlive donor funding.

It's a story about far more than eggs. It's about what happens when healthy food becomes something people genuinely want - and how changing the meaning of a single food can help change children's futures.

Episode speakers:

• Rowena Merritt - Social and Behaviour Change Specialist - Nutrition at UNICEF
• Bhai Shelly - Former Social & Behaviour Change Chief, UNICEF Rwanda 
• Alice Mwizerwa – Head of Heza Initiative

Resources:

• First Foods Africa (UNICEF, Sept 2025).
• One Egg per Child, Every Day (Rwanda, 2022–23)

The views and opinions expressed by the contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UNICEF or any entities they represent. The content here is for information purposes only.

The ABCs of SBC is hosted by Qali Id and produced and developed by UNICEF in partnership with Common Thread.

Check out UNICEF’s latest publication on Social and Behaviour Change, Hidden in Plain Sight, a celebration of the everyday heroes on the frontlines of public health outbreaks, or the first publication, Why don’t you just behave! For more information about UNICEF SBC, check out the programme guidance.

We care about what you think — you can share your thoughts on the podcast using this feedback form. For all other inquiries, please contact sbc@unicef.org.

Transcript

Qali: 0:00

Every year, on the first Friday of August, the whole of Rwanda comes together to celebrate Umuganura, the national harvest festival. Families gather around tables filled with food, communities give thanks for the harvest, and across the country, one food holds a special place of honor: cow's milk. For generations, milk has symbolized prosperity, abundance, and good health. It's far more than something to drink. It's woven into Rwanda's identity. Every culture has foods like that, foods that carry meaning beyond nutrition, and every culture has the opposite, too. Foods we all know are good for us but somehow never become part of everyday life. Knowing something is healthy doesn't automatically make us want to eat it. A few years ago, in Rwanda, that food was eggs. Not because eggs were difficult to find, many families already kept chickens in their own backyards, but eggs meant something different. They were something to sell at the market, something associated with income, not something many parents thought to feed their young children every day. Fast-forward to last year's Umuganura celebrations. Everyone took part. Government ministers, celebrities all stood alongside one another, helping feed children eggs as part of the national celebration right beside the milk. Nobody thought it was unusual. That shift from something to sell to something worth feeding your child every day is the story of this episode. I'm Qali Id, and this is The ABCs of SBC, a UNICEF podcast where we explore how social and behavior change can help us tackle some of the most urgent and complex issues facing children today. So how do you change the meaning of food, and in particular, the humble egg? Let's go to Rwanda and hear from Alice Minizirwa from the Heza Initiative and Bhai Shelly from UNICEF.

Alice: 2:02

Rwandan the culture food, I would say mostly it's carbohydrates. We eat cassava. If it's not the real hard cassava, then we make cassava flour and we make an alternative of that. And then if it's not that, we're having yams. And for the alternative, if you go to the to the vegetables, they will only have green leaves mostly here. And if they go for drinks, they will definitely do milk. Rwandans traditionally are the type of people that won't prefer water over milk, and I think that's a lot of Rwanda, We love our milk. And for that very long time because that's the food they grew up eating, that's what the family believe is the real food. So at first it was really hard to tell them, "You can have some eggs," because it was never considered a food for everybody. It was food for those rich people who are trying to have extra food.

Bhai: 2:58

Two-third of the households having chicken and other animal source means they had access in some way, but they were not using it for feeding children. So what they were doing, they were taking it to market, selling it and making money to run the household. So the major challenge was changing this behavior from selling to feeding. And the second challenge was when we looked at the awareness data, it was not bad. People were aware of nutritional value of egg and other nutritious food, but the real problem was consumption, so the behavior of actual practice. So the positioning of egg was very, very important.

Qali: 3:43

Positioning. That word is doing a lot of work, and it's worth pausing on because it's not really a nutrition word at all. It's a marketing one. It's part of a bigger toolkit for how you make a product more desirable, borrowed straight from the commercial world, and it has a name. Rowena Merritt works on exactly this for First Foods Africa, a UNICEF initiative tackling child food poverty across the continent by working on supply and demand, making sure nutritious, affordable foods are actually available, and making sure families want to buy them and feed them to their children

Rowena: 4:22

So the main social and behavior change tool that we use in First Foods Africa is social marketing. And the reason why we use social marketing is because we have very clear products that we are trying to get people to buy and to feed their children with. So we need to think about the products that we are supplying are they the right products in the first place? Are they socially acceptable products? But we also need to think about the price, place, promotion, packaging. So basically, all the Ps of marketing, , that we think about within First Foods Africa to make sure that we not only have the right products, but we have them costed at the right price.

Qali: 5:09

Product, price, place, promotion. Keep those four in mind, because Rwanda's campaign ends up running through every one of them, just not in a marketing textbook, but in villages across the country, and in the other countries across the continent where First Foods Africa is running similar campaigns. But first, why borrow from marketing at all? Here's Rowena on what nutrition programming looked like before that shift

Rowena: 5:38

In the past, social and behavior change was often seen as a kind of add-on to nutrition program and work, it was always built on the assumption that we just need to educate people, we just need to get them to understand what's healthy, what's not healthy, and then change their behavior and feed their children these healthy products. But the reality is that, we're not rational, we don't make rational decisions. We're governed by social cultural, and emotional actions that influence how we behave and what we do. But also, we now recognize that there's big competition in that wherever you go in the world, there is junk food marketing. It's not a fair playing field in many ways because this junk food marketing is there promoting aggressively, often aimed at children and young people, including first foods. So that's why it's been recognized more and more by nutrition colleagues that actually supply, of course, is important. But then we need the social and behavior change activities to take us that extra step to change and challenge some of those social and cultural norms, but also generate demand for healthy, nutritious foods. I always remember, years ago, I worked in Ethiopia. And we went to this very remote village. You couldn't get there by car, so we had to drive along a dry riverbed, and then hike up a hill for about an hour. I got to the top of that hill, and was… in someone's house. They'd made part of it into a little shop, and I could get a cold Coca-Cola in that shop. I couldn't get any fresh food. I couldn't even get water, but I could get Coca-Cola.

Qali: 7:30

When a soft drink can reach a village before water can, that tells you what healthy food is up against. Big brands that find their way into remote communities long before fresh vegetables ever could, using exactly the tools Rowena just named. So if junk food already has product, price, place, and promotion working in its favor, healthy food needs the same four working just as hard. That's the case for social marketing in a sentence. Here's what it looked like in practice

Rowena: 8:05

you have to use the tools and the techniques that these junk food companies use, but use them for healthy, nutritious foods. Otherwise, it's just not a fair playing ground at all. But of course, we will never have the budget that these junk food companies have for marketing. If you think about commercial marketing, how they promote their products, they never really talk about health. they talk about feelings, like how you feel as a mother. They talk about friendship, togetherness how your husband looks at you with loving eyes because you've fed this wonderful meal to the children and the family. They sell feelings and emotions, and they make promises. They make these promises that are aspirational. If you use this product, this is, this is what you'll get. This is the feeling that you'll get. And so with First Foods Africa, that's what we've tried to focus on, selling feelings and emotions. So with the One Egg a Day campaign in Rwanda, if you sell that feeling, that emotional connection, that's where you get better traction than just talking about the health benefits. Eggs are like Superman food. They are super healthy. They are fantastic from a nutrition point of view. But it's not always about just selling that health aspect, it's selling that bigger emotional hook

Qali: 9:34

That's promotion, one of the social marketing Ps. Rwanda's team took that same emotional logic and pointed it at where people already live their lives, weaving eggs into moments that already mattered rather than asking anyone to build a new habit from scratch. Football matches watched across the country, monthly community gatherings, and eventually Rwanda's national harvest festival, Umuganura itself

Bhai: 10:01

So I would like to mention about World Cup football and, , that was the moment where, sports was used to create conversation on importance of egg, and that coincided with, , 2022, , FIFA World Cup. And so it created a very good momentum, a neutral platform, and people were watching,, sports, , enjoying it, and at the same time, , getting exposed to the important information and messages on, egg feeding. Then the other big initiative was, Muganura which is celebrated every year in the first week of August. And that is the moment where the whole country gathers in their districts and celebrates a fresh harvest. And we were very happy during the last Muganura in 2025 to see that all the celebrities ministers, everybody was involved in feeding egg to the child where they were doing distribution of milk.

Qali: 11:05

You see, promotion decides what people feel about an egg and where they hear about it, but it can't do anything if the egg isn't actually there. That's the next P in social marketing: place. And in some villages, that's where the whole campaign nearly stalled. Let's hear from Alice again, who works with communities to promote egg consumption

Alice: 11:29

a group of volunteers realized that, "Whoa, we are teaching people about eggs, but we do not have eggs in the community." And that group of volunteers created saving groups. They started saving not just a coin like other saving groups in the community, but 1,500 every week. And that's when they were able to rent a land, get the they set up poultry farming. They got a hatching machine, and they were able to hatch around 2,000 eggs every other three weeks. And those were specifically to get more chicks. They started by making sure that each group member gets five hens at home and ensuring that they get eggs. that started to increase the number of clients they had, either getting the chicks, either getting the eggs. And those other saving groups in other villages, and in their village as well, could come to get the chicks. So the business started thriving from what we were teaching the community, and that was a great opportunity for them because up to now they're still in operating and they're doing quite amazing job

Qali: 12:46

Which leaves one of those Ps still standing, price. Not just the number chalked up at a market stall. but everything a person weighs against that number. What else needs that money this week, and what do they believe they're actually getting back for it? Alice saw that calculation play out most starkly with fathers.

Alice: 13:09

The hardest of them all were men . Convincing men that, it's something doable. They will tell you, "No, we grew up not eating the eggs. Do you see us struggling?" A man will tell you that they do not have money for eggs, yet they are holding, , a bottle of beer. And it was all about teaching them, you know, you can skip a beer a day and make sure your children have eggs, make sure they are healthy, because after all, if they are not eating healthy, then they won't be succeeding academically, and it will be up to you paying the same school fees over and over again for same academic year.

Qali: 13:45

What Alice was describing wasn't really about fathers and beer. It was about how when money is tight, people spend it on whatever feels most necessary that day. And after a long day, a cold beer can feel exactly like that. The campaign's job wasn't to shame that choice. It was to make an egg feel just as necessary as everything else already on that grocery list. And Bai's team saw the same thing show up in the numbers

Bhai: 14:15

one of the data was about spending. We were tracking how much, the parents are ready to spend money for eggs, and this question was, disaggregated between, mother and father. And, the response of fathers was worrying because, they were citing, , that they don't have enough, money to, invest in, egg or any kind of nutrition. So that was the start point, I would say. So in the, engagements, community engagement we tried to reframe, the role of fathers and, the tagline like, "A smart father invest in child's brain." we found that, the families where, more eggs were being consumed, had some father, men in the family more engaged and, prioritizing, purchasing eggs or, going for poultry at the household level. After this intervention they felt more comfortable in taking the child in the lap, feeding playing with the child. So it comes as a package, and we were very happy to see this kind of change,

Qali: 15:25

So that's all the four Ps. Product, repositioning the egg from income to nutrition. Place, solving a genuine gap in supply with a savings group and a hatching machine. Promotion, leveraging cultural events like the harvest festival to normalize feeding eggs to children. And price, not just the market price, but the price of a father's pride reframed by one tagline into something worth investing in. So did it actually work? Bhai's team tracked the single behavior they'd set out to change. How many young children were actually eating an egg?

Bhai: 16:03

There is a positive journey from like 7.7% daily consumption of egg to now 30% but in terms of weekly, it has gone up to 60%. These are real behaviors and it was not easy to crack.

Qali: 16:19

That's roughly a fourfold rise in children eating an egg every day, and more than half now eating one most weeks. This is the power of SBC. But what if SBC could do more? What if it could create enough demand to give businesses the confidence to produce healthier foods in the first place? That's the question sitting at the heart of First Foods Africa

Rowena: 16:44

Donors are saying,"Hey, we're not prepared to just keep giving you money so you buy products and distribute them. We want something that's much more sustainable." We are basically trying to create a valid market model that is not dependent on aid money buying up huge amounts of stock. What we've come to realize as the project has evolved, demand is absolutely vital . Companies say to us, "Well, if people aren't gonna demand it, we're not gonna supply it because, we're gonna lose money," we're now having to go back to companies to say, "Actually, we're gonna support with demand generation," and that has given them more confidence to take the risk, to take kind of a leap of faith and start creating healthy, nutritious foods. First Foods Africa has been set up as a response to create a more sustainable model, and that's where I think the value of social and behavior change, and the value of, in particular, social marketing, comes into its own. It looks at all that product price, place, promotion, packaging. It brings it all together, always underpinned by an understanding of human behavior and has huge success. And we see that from the commercial world. So I always think, "Why should the devil have all the best tunes?" So this gives us all those tools and techniques, but, to help improve nutrition outcomes.

Qali: 18:18

That's also who's left holding this campaign now, not UNICEF, but district leadership and Rwanda's National Child Development Agency. But handing it over only works if the change keeps spreading long after the campaign itself moves on, and that's not something a survey can measure well. It's something you see happen in one house at a time. One story shows exactly how that plays out. In Rwanda, community health workers track a child's growth on a simple red, yellow, and green scale. Red means a child isn't growing as they should, and green means they're on track. Alice told me about a mother in Kisagara District whose child moved through all three.

Alice: 19:03

They had a stunted child, specifically in red, and it was not like they were poor or something. They just never thought of children nutrition as something very important. So it was all about us teaching them, you can just save an egg every day from those 10 eggs that you're taking to the market every day. Just take one, feed it to the child, and gradually the child started to get better. He, she started to gain weight, though, moved from red to yellow in three weeks, and then later get into green. And now that specific mother is the one teaching other community members about feeding their child eggs every day.

Qali: 19:48

She had the means all along. What changed was what the egg meant to her. Not something to sell, but something worth setting aside for her child. And once she saw it work, she became the evidence other parents needed. Not an expert repeating a message, but someone they knew saying, "This worked for my child." That's the real test of whether something is sustainable, not whether a program keeps running, but whether the change keeps spreading once nobody's paying for it anymore. Thank you to Rowena Merritt, Bhai Shelley, and Alice Minisegwa for joining me. To learn more about the One Egg Per Child campaign, First Foods Africa, or the work of the Hezaf Initiative, it's all in the show notes. Please subscribe and share this episode. Until next time, I'm Qali Id.