Improve education for 2,500 children in Kenya

Our Farm2Fork initiative is already bearing fruit (quite literally!) and giving children yet another reason to love coming to an African Promise partner school. 

Across the three more established kitchen gardens, produce including leafy greens, tomatoes and even bananas and papaya is already being harvested and used to supplement the occasional lunchtime meal and to provide tasty and healthy snacks at other times of the day.

Similar spaces are in the early stages of development at two further partner schools with preparations also being made at a sixth and seventh (of our eight) partner schools.

Whilst the established spaces have thrived with the help of prolonged rains at the end of last year and early part of this, the real challenge comes now, in the dry season, when artificial irrigation is required. This is especially so as only a couple of our partner schools has a connection to any sort of external water supply and the rest are reliant almost entirely on reserves of harvested rainwater or expensive deliveries of water by bowser.

There is a plan for drip irrigation systems to be added to the kitchen gardens in the future (we will be trialling a system in one kitchen garden soon) and other measures to minimise water loss through evaporation and drainage (such as shade nets, mulching and lining of beds) are already being adopted.

We are hugely proud of what our partner schools are achieving with our financial support and that of our donors. There is a real enthusiasm for this initiative amongst entire school communities and healthy 'competition' to replicate the successes that they see each other achieving.

That can only help the initiative go from strength-to-strength and we look forward to updating you on progress.

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Links:

• Take a tour of a garden here.