“On the same piece of land where I wanted to put up a livestock shed, I changed it to accommodate a kitchen garden. This was after the land had stayed idle for sometime due to insufficient funds to enable its construction. After the training on Climate Smart Agriculture by Fadhili Trust’s Agriculture Extension Officer and hearing of its gains, I developed an interest and decided to start planting ‘sukuma wiki”, spinach, cabbage, pepper, and onions. The very initial harvest saw me make sales worth Kshs.350. Currently, I make up to Kshs.450 on a daily basis from my farm produce. Upon successful establishment of kitchen garden, I extended to the nearby farm and started growing tomatoes using the planting basin water harvesting techniques trained by the officer and it is working well in water conservation” recalls Susan Kanini Kisangau from Kivwauni village, a member of Wendo wa Kivwauni Village Savings and Loaning Association(VSLA)

Fadili Trust, in partnership with Tearfund Canada, Canadian Food Grain Bank (CFGB) and the Government of Canada (GAC), is implementing a 4-year Nature+ project in Kibwezi West sub-county of Makueni County. The program’s objective is to execute a gender-responsive, context appropriate nature-based solutions that contribute to climate resilience, livelihood enhancement and land restoration.

Susan Kanini, a 60-year-old lady, married to John Kisangau Musyoka has five children; three girls, two boys and are blessed with eight grand-children. Ms. Kanini says life before coming into contact with Fadhili Trust was full of constant struggles with regular visits to shopping centers for household vegetables, immediately after training sessions on VSL and Climate Smart Agriculture, she says she looks forward to living each day with a lot of enthusiasm as she is sure of engaging in productive activities. Prior to venturing into full time farming courtesy of trainings conducted by Fadhili Trust, she was practicing chicken rearing but the feeds became extremely costly and could not keep up with the cost. She also tried fish farming and water became a challenge, making it unsustainable.

“If all group members adhere to the weekly lessons taught by Fadhili Trust, we’ll all become a food secure village, ward and even sub-county,” says Ms. Kanini. She continues to say, “Because of the erratic rainfall experienced in our geographical area, most of us were reluctant to practice farming even at small-scale level, but with the training on ways of farming that conserve natural resources like soil and water resulting in improved and sustainable production, members have fully embraced farming. We have even become Trainer of Trainers (Tots) at out own basic level where we teach other community members who are not part of our VSL group on matters Climate Smart Agriculture by showing them methods of water retention in the soil where we use minimal water, crops association, mulching and minimum soil disturbance,” adds Ms. Kanini with a warm, happy smile that spreads across her face, lighting up her eyes with a twinkle of evidently genuine joy.

Ms. Kanini says as opposed to other organisations that would come, train them and go their way not caring whether the concept was grasped or not, Fadhili Trust’s strategy is different, practical and more sustainable. They walk with group members until one is able to successfully internalize and correctly put into practice lessons learnt, an approach the organisation has gained a buy-in with the community in their areas of operation. On a weekly basis, on average, Kanini harvests and sells seven crates of tomatoes. Currently, when the season is low, she sells a crate at Ksh.1,500, a total of Kshs.10,500 weekly. When the demand for tomatoes increases, she hopes to be selling them at Ksh.3,000 per crate, which will translate to Kshs.21,000 per week.

As an all-inclusive approach, in the Nature+ project, Fadhili Trust is deliberately incorporating Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) into the VSLA groups, thereby helping communities achieve more sustainable and prosperous future, balancing economic growth with environmental stewardship.

In Kivwauni VSLA Group, women are now setting aside bigger portions of land for the practice of kitchen garden as they have now embraced it as an alternative source of income, where they are now able to unburden their husbands from some provision roles by meaningfully contributing to the daily food basket in their homes. From the proceeds, she has even chipped in in paying her grand-children’s school fees. They have also learnt to diversify planting of different vegetables species like cabbage, tomatoes, ‘sukuma wiki’, spinach and capsicum., unlike in the past where they only planted one type of food crop, aiding in preventing diet related illnesses.

On Loaning and Savings, members meet up every Wednesday where they buy shares, each share costs 50 shillings and the maximum are five shares per sitting worth 250 Kenya Shillings. Fadhili has come up with a model which literally get members out of poverty and into financial independence by making them believe that they can start small with whatever amount they have, borrow the same money at minimal interest rate and with time, grow their share base. The group believes that they will one day in the near future purchase land as a group and for individuals.

“Personally, I would highly advice farmers both in small scale and large-scale farming to practice conservation agriculture. From experience, crops get to grow faster as water is conserved using  water conservation technologies like zai pits, planting basins and hand furrows. These methods incorporated with mulching and application of organic manure improve soil fertility and structure, thus, production is higher,” Ms.Kanini interjects, evidently having become a CSA ambassador.

Susan says her only major challenge currently is water as she solely depends on rain water. Even though she has plastic water tanks in her home, they are still not sufficient to maximally support her in farming as well as for domestic use and she requests if Fadhili Trust could do piping to a nearby kiosk to help community members to at least practice subsistence farming and for her to also upgrade into large scale farming. Equally, Susan has planted a number of trees and desires to plant more trees with availability of water in a bid to combat desertification even at a small degree. She has also started putting up tree nurseries of up to 10,000 tree seedlings which will also boost her income whenever she sells them out.