Restoring organic farming in Kiirua-Meru, Kenya

Language(s)
13 August 2022
Kandi

One of the main reasons why I’m restoring and conserving forests is to improve livelihoods and nutrition in my community. Forests host considerable biodiversity and contribute to the general health and wellbeing of their surroundings. For instance, forest conservation enables adequate rainfall to maximize the quality of agricultural outputs, as well as provide oxygen to all living beings.

We have partnered with Kenya Environmental Action Network (KEAN), Greenhouse Communications and Mama Day School to make this initiative a success. As a result of this collaboration, we have established a ‘Bustani Garden’ – an organic vegetable garden within our eco-village. This program aims at enabling children aged 5–15 years to learn how to establish kitchen gardens, appreciate agriculture as a source of income and career pathway, and encourage environmental conservation through organic farming.


  • An official site visit to the Kean team and demonstration by Mama Day pupils and the Loah team on nursery bed preparation.

The involvement of children throughout the project, has enhanced a great sense of ownership and learning, especially since the garden is already growing rapidly after just a month and a half. The children have so far learned how to prepare nursery beds, plant seeds in the beds, care for seedlings through watering and weeding, develop improvised vertical gardens that help utilize garden space and transplant seedlings into the vertical gardens.

Kandi teaches kids to establish a vertical garden with locally available resources such as reused sacks, as well as to transplant spinach from the nursery into the garden.

We hope this garden will improve nutrition and restoration efforts both in the school and our community as a whole.

          The Future is Green 🙂

Kandi

More by

See all stories by  

We want you to share this article, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to redistribute our material for non-commercial purposes. All we ask is that you give appropriate credit and link to this content, indicate if changes were made, and distribute your contributions under the same Creative Commons license. You must notify us if you repost, reprint or reuse our materials by contacting info[at]globallandscapesforum.org.


Leave a Reply

Supporting partners 2023

Supporting partners

The Restoration Stewards program provides funding, mentorship and training to deepen the impact of youth-led restoration projects. The year-long program is run by the Youth in Landscapes Initiative (YIL) and the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) under the banner of Generation Restoration to support and highlight the work of eight young restoration practitioners and their teams in 2023.

During the program, the Restoration Stewards and their teams are  supported to further develop their project and serve as ambassadors at both global and local levels. Globally, the Restoration Stewards share their journeys in a series of vlogs and blogs documenting their stories of inspiration and challenges and participate in different international events to showcase their work. Locally, they are sparking a restoration movement, mobilizing local communities and creating pathways to connect, share, learn, and act for livelihoods and landscapes.