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Urban farms empower Africa
Aid providers in Congo and elsewhere are discovering that lessons in farming can succeed where food handouts have not.
from the May 9, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
"At the health centers, we noticed that children were regularly coming in malnourished," explains Mbuyi Joseph, who now runs a Kinshasa-wide urban gardens project. "There were feeding programs, but the programs would last three months, and after they ended, the kids would be malnourished again. We needed to do something to stop this problem. We needed to help them farm produce – at least something."
"Gardening is one of the things you can do to help families," he continues. "It's not expensive to start up. You don't need a lot of capital."
The idea of city farming is not exactly novel. There are many small gardens in American cities, although these plots rarely mean the difference between life and death for their tenders. Throughout urban Africa, as well, it is common to see brittle corn stalks peeking out from behind crowded shacks.
But it is only recently that aid organizations – many of which for years believed that feeding programs were the best response to hunger – have increased their support for this type of agriculture. Now, many of the large UN agencies such as UNICEF, the World Food Program, and the Food and Agriculture Organization have teamed up with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to teach urban farming skills, distribute seeds and tools, and help new city farmers grow the right foods to maximize family nutrition. From Accra, Ghana, to Hyderabad, India, groups of NGOs are working together to build urban agriculture networks.
Kinshasa was one of the early test centers for urban gardens. In 1995, the "Programme Presbyterien de Jardinage" (PPJ) – a Presbyterian gardening project – received funds from Catholic Relief Services to manage an urban agriculture project here, focusing on the families of malnourished children. It organized a team of local volunteers called "Mama Bongisa" ("mom improver") to teach mothers in some of Kinshasa's most impoverished neighborhoods about nutrition and farming.
The project reported rapid results: After only three months, the percentage of families in the program who kept gardens increased from 54 to 73, and the amount of land each family planted more than doubled. At the beginning of the program, according to PPJ, 64 percent of the children in targeted households were malnourished. After five visits from Mama Bongisa, that number dropped to 20 percent. The gains continue.
"So many times in Congo you start something and then it falls apart. That didn't happen here," says Larry Sthreshley. He and his wife, Inge, helped set up the PPJ garden project in the mid-1990s. "A critical mass of information gathers, and then you see neighbors helping neighbors," he adds.
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