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Short description
In collaboration with rural based schools and vulnerable communities, the team will provide experiential training in sustainable agriculture, nutrition, improved cooking practices and develop demonstration gardens which will be school led and community based. This is to benefit the community of about 600 people, girls, women and families to break the poverty, malnutrition and food insecurity.
The problem we aim to solve
Malnutrition is an antecedent arising from poor nutrition. In Uganda, Malnutrition roots back from people’s cultures and the style of food preparation. For example all the staple foods in Uganda from the different regions are starchy and high in carbohydrates like Millet, sorghum, cassava, Potatoes.
Our main focus is to change people’s mindset about nutrition through sharing knowledge on sustainable agriculture practices, improved cooking and demonstration gardens and help people use up the unused land into nutritious vegetable production.
Our solution
It’s necessary to equip women with the skills and knowledge they need for a sustainable and nutritious food production at home because they constitute up to 60% of the agricultural labor force in Uganda. In addition, they are responsible for child care involving food preparation. Therefore training women in better cooking practices would help in improving the family nutrition status.
The project will be school and community centered whereby the pupils and women will be trained in various sustainable agriculture techniques such as seed bed preparation, garden planning, planting, transplanting, sack gardening, fertility management, crop rotation, nursery bed preparation and water harvesting. This shall be done under the mobile farm field school where pupils and women will be encouraged to start up their home gardens to put the learned agricultural skills into practice on their own.
Other benefits of the home garden include direct access to the nutritious vegetables, teaching valuable technical skills to the children and neighbors, increasing home income through sale of surplus vegetables.
The agricultural trainings will be supplemented by improved cooking demonstrations, this is aimed at helping families integrate new nutritious vegetables into their diet since they supply the necessary vitamins.
The innovativeness of our approach
The onsite cooking demonstrations of vegetables from the demonstration garden will help in changing the community’s mindset by integrating new foods in their diets. In addition, we address malnutrition by transferring agricultural knowledge and skills from the demonstration site to their homes, Re-purposing dormant land into productive home gardens increasing the land productivity and household income from sale of surplus vegetables, communicating the importance of nutritious vegetables and its impact on one’s health, empowering women, girls and children to take their wellbeing into their own hands.
Technologies and Methods
Active community mobilization through the local leaders and councilors to help reach out directly to the vulnerable people in the village and probably the remote areas. Strong partnerships also with the ministry of agriculture will be resourceful as it can help us in mobilization through the district representatives and extension workers.
The mobile field farm school (MFFS) will help in trainings and sharing knowledge with the women, girls and school pupils. The community can be divided into about four groups and each trained once every week onsite for about 4months. To ensure sustainability of the project, each group will be tasked to choose a leader that will be also trained on various leadership skills, agricultural knowledge so as to overlook the group and also will be helping in mobilization of the fellow members on tasks to accomplish each day of the meeting.
Potential Partners
Community based organization with the same vision and goals as our team can be so helpful in project implementation. These include among others: The ministry of agriculture, the district agriculture officer, the district health officer, Schools in the target communities, Community leaders and other stakeholders in agriculture like the School of Agricultural Sciences, Makerere University.
Das Voting endet am 24. Juni 2018, 23:59 Uhr.
| Team: | Yessey Ndyamuhaki
Felix Kansiime Festo Chris Dufitumukiza |