We are delighted to showcase the wonderful new drip-irrigation system installed at Guzha Primary School. Linked up to their reliable water supply this will quite literally drip feed the crops needed to put nutritious meals on the school’s tables. It took two days for the engineers to complete the work and led to much excitement from the students to the Head Teacher. Their onward responsibilities include making liquid fertilizer and ensuring the compost pile matures well. We have also handed over lots of tools including hoes, forks, rakes and watering cans for those crops not covered by the drip system. The school also elected to build their own grass fences to help protect their produce from wild animals and roaming livestock.
Over at Dandara Primary School things are also progressing nicely. The chicken house has been built and the chickens arrived. Once settled in the chickens should lay one egg each per day, giving the student’s a huge boost in their protein intake. In addition to this they’ve been busy growing cabbages and have shown a diligent commitment to farming well.
We’re delighted that things are going so well but with great success comes the responsibility to deliver these projects in an excellent way and to find the remaining funding it will take to do so. Please helps us and thank you!
If you would like to know more about our work, please get in touch on GlobalGiving or via social media.
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In the last quarter we’ve been delighted to be back training participants of both Guzha Primary School and Dandara Primary School. Each four day training programme included our ‘Pfumvudza’ model’s potential to produce enough food for a family of six for an entire year. Other topics included; vegetable production, household remedies, composting, agroforestry as well as leadership and team building.
The participants were trained to establish demonstration plots in their school, personal fields and the surrounding communities. The teachers were encouraged to patiently teach their pupils thepracticality of the intervention, to help them to not just understand what conservation agriculture is and its importance, but for them to gain the necessary skills for them adopt it in their fields at home.
We’ve also been preparing the demonstration crop plots where the theory will be put in to practice and the school feeding programme will literally come to life.
We’ll show you the exciting results next time…
Thank you
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Project update and exciting project announcement below
This quarter we’ve been back at Inyagui Primary school. Even though the main part of the project is now over we want to stay involved and make sure that outcomes are sustainable. While we were there we spoke to the Head Teacher and a number of others and checked out the maize crop and the chicken house. We also had a look at the record keeping to see what crops had been harvested, how many eggs had been produced and what was done with them, whether feeding students or helping the school buy much needed equipment. The students eat eggs every two weeks (we’ve encouraged a little more frequent if possible) and surplus have been sold for $380, meeting community needs. Chicken and egg production has doubled with over 4,000 eggs being produced since we started.
At the time of the visit, the school had established 360 cabbages, 7500 onions, 400 tomato plants and 5 beds of kale, all for the school kitchen. Also we heard that parents have been buying school crops and selling them on in the community for a profit. This means that more food is circulating in the local community addressing our goals around malnutrition and the profits are helping pay for student’s tuition fees. Win-win. There’s also big plans to add three more irrigated Pfumvudza plots to the farming activities so the school is really going from strength to strength. With more regular, nutritious food for the students, parents and the wider community plus the entrepreneurial activities supporting school budgets and developing the skills of the students we’re delighted with the situation.
Were also super excited to announce a new project with Ghuza primary starting NOW. This project will last two years and use an enhanced model to delvier more sustainable benefits addressing food insecurity malnutrition and building more resilience in the community against the effects of climate change. We can’t wait to get started and we’ll tell you more next time!!!
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This has been a particularly exciting quarter and we’re happy to present some of the evaluation findings from our work with Inyagwe Primary School. For a long time now (Covid presented some delays) we’ve been working together to teach conservation agriculture, helping to tackle food insecurity and build resilience against the growing effects of climate change.
“This project allows everyone in the community to earn money and have enough food.”
Mr N. Majogo, School Development Committee, Chairperson
Crop production over the course of the project has gone through the roof, here’s some highlights comparing 2020-2021.
Onions – up from 600 to 1,300, that’s 217% growth
Tomatoes up from 120kg to 400kg a growth of 333%
Sugar Beans – up from 10kgs to 60kgs a whopping 600%.
Maize – up from 150kgs to 1,750kg, a staggering 1,167%
To date, approximately 40 meals have been provided for each of the 398 students attending the school. Totalling 15,920 meals this is a great and substantial achievement but still falls a long way short of what is truly required. With the school aiming to give one meal per student, per day this requires 1,990 meals per week and we can see that approximately eight full weeks of food have been provided thus far. The great leap forward in capacity and relative to what they were able to produce/provide before is a true measure of the success of the project. This is further supported by feedback received from the Headmaster stating, “Yes, benefits were observed. It increased the school enrolment and minimized absenteeism.” A teacher goes on to note “Pupil’s participation in classwork has highly increased”.
There have been other benefits too but we’ll save some of that for next time…
Thanks to all our donors and supporters. Please help us spread the word, and raise more funds so we can keep up this life changing work.
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What have we done recently? The answer is - quite a lot! We’ve been delivering training to schools and communities on nutritional gardens with a particular focus on cash-crops. Using our climate smart methods this work supports livelihoods by producing chia, mucuna bean and sunflower. There is of course the added bonus that people have their own sustainable source of sunflower oil for the home.
We’ve also been working with our key school Inyaguwe to ensure that they are preparing the land for the next planting season. This is a great time of year to be making mulch which, using the by-products of the season just gone has be ability to put fresh nutrition back into the ground making it strong and fertile for the coming crops.
We’re also excited to be working on a new proposal for an enhanced methodology – if you’d like to find out more get in touch with our Operations Manager, Andrew Jackson at andrew@zimbabweeducaitonaltrust.org.uk Building on the way we’ve always done things we plan to make things more sustainable and wide reaching in the long-term.
Thanks as always to all our supporters.
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