Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) initiative

WE DID IT! Thanks to your support, we have reached our fundraising goal for our Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) project. We are so grateful for your enthusiasm and generosity in helping poor farmers help themselves through access to information that can improve and increase their crops and livestock.

Together, we’ve reached the following milestones:

• Our network of 1,200 CKWs has helped 17,000 more farmers since March 2013. We’ve now reached more than 185,000 farmers since the start of our project.

• Our CKWs have helped farmers learn how best to treat their crops and livestock in 1,300 more villages – for a total of more than 19,000 villages reached since we began our initiative.

• Our CKWs have had more than 200,000 interactions with farmers over the past three months – for a total of 1.8 million interactions.

Your donations to Grameen Foundation have helped Ugandans like Charles Chebet, a farmer and CKW in northern Uganda. A father of four, Charles has improved his coffee harvest thanks to the smartphone and training provided by Grameen Foundation. He has even added bananas, cabbage, and vegetable crops to his farm, as well as goats and pigs.

As a CKW, Charles has connected hundreds of other farmers to advice, technical assistance, and equipment loans. When a disease was affecting area banana crops, Charles used the information from his phone to create a simple mixture that saved his farmer neighbors’ banana crops from ruin.

Charles is proud to serve his community and hopes to do even more to improve farming in his area. As he says, “I am supposed to visit more than 100 farmers every month, but I always [visit] more. I have bought some equipment, which helps me have a bigger harvest and teach other farmers about these practices. We want to help farmers get better fertilizers, seeds, and tools. Maybe a shop can open here that sells those things. Maybe I can do that in the future.”

Once again, THANK YOU for providing vital information that helps smallholder farmers lead more productive livelihoods. With your help, you have connected some of Uganda’s poorest people to their potential and enabled them to have even brighter plans for the future.