Kubunina,access to school to 70 Congolese children

The activities of school gardens and their vegetables production (eggplant, onions, peppers, cabbage, pumpkin, tomatoes ...) are going on.

In Kalemie, at the village of Tabac Congo, another school became part of the project and, in addition to beekeeping, was created a garden.
Congolese project partners, in collaboration with a local agronomist, are working with the parents to restore confidence in the project activities and to identify possible buyers of vegetable products (retailers, local civil and military authorities, families of international organizations…).
A correct enhancement of the market's products will be the goal on which will focus during the next months.
This activity is essential to ensure the sustainability of the initiative.
In the coming weeks we intend to distribute further agricultural tools of parents.

Alongside the gardens designed to income generating, other gardens, near the schools, will be set up to development a platform for learning about a lot of subjects: nutrition, environment, agriculture.

Next mission in RDC of the Italian team will be focus on a training course for the teachers of four congolese primary schools about this educational value of the gardens.

The teaching and educational value of the garden has to be found in many activities that the teachers can carry out with the pupils.

Educating through the tool of the school garden stimulates a multidisciplinary teaching approach, improving the school curriculum.

This approach integrates some of the other Kubunina activities creating important synergies for achieving the project objectives.
To this aim, the parents’ pupils involved in the initiative are preparing the ground to start a “educational”garden within each school that it will support the teaching.

Recently the teaching staff of secondary school (Agricultural Institute of Kisamba, 5 km from Kipaka) was expressed interest partecipanting at the training course on educational gardens and then to start this activity.

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At this time, four representatives of the congolese team are in Italy to work with the italian project partners, to meet all the student of the 10 italian schools involved in Kubunina Program and to create a few event in order to diffuse to the public the project results.

Furthermore we are making several working session about income generating activities:
school gardens, apiculture.

The seven Kubunina School gardens (four in Kalemie and three in Kasongo) are in this moment in full production, in particular the parents are collecting tomatoes, cabbages, eggplants, which are well sold in the local market.
The sale of the products of the school gardens, at this time is supporting the school fees of about 230 children in the Kalemie area and 140 children in of Kasongo area.
We are planning strategies in order to improve the number of the supported student because the needs are very strong : a big part of the families have an daily income of around 0,5 USD.

The plants produced from seedbeds have been distributed to the students' families and many small gardens have been created in the villages.
This activity of Kubunina is very important as it allows you to achieve two goals: motivating the parents’ involvement and the creation of family vegetable garden, tool support for families.

Thanks for your contribution to help us to help themselves.