Community Garden

The majority of Shanti Uganda families are small holder farmers, growing food to curb malnutrition among family members, especially mums and babies. Throughout the previous quarter, emphasis has been put on learning about how our families can move from growing nutritious food for their homes, to growing more food for income generation. Our amazing interns have been researching and documenting best practices and they have also visited other farms to learn and share knowledge about agriculture and its related income generation components. This is not only to increase incomes for our families so that they can meet wider basic needs, including education and eradicating poverty, but also for Shanti Uganda to expand our community garden into a fully fledged demonstration farm. In the long run we expect that the farm shall be a source of food to staff, demonstration and multiplication space for the community as well as a source of income for the organisation. All the research and best practices we have learned from collaborating with and visiting other farms and organisations is going to be used as we prepare for the upcoming planting season. Beyond learning about the great farming ideas, we have learned how to incorporate Microfinance into our Nutrition and Community Garden Program. We envisage that this will support our smallholder farming households to access funds for expanding their gardens. Whilst they will be able to buy needed quantities of quality seed, hire manual labour and also access better markets for improved incomes. From these program improvements, we expect improved household nutrition, better farming practices, increased incomes and improved livelihoods.