Agro Biodiversity for nutrition security a case of Joy town school
Summary
SCOPE Kenya, promotes permaculture practices to support school communities to redesign their school ground and establish sustainable productive land scape, with food forest and cool micro climate, for enhanced learning, abundance and resilience.
To enhance sustainable solutions to hunger and restoration of degraded land, SCOPE uses a participatory holistic school development approach, which involves working with all schools stakeholders (pupils, teachers, parents/surrounding communities and local leaders) and use local resources for production of healthy safe food, protect nature and equip learners will life skills for self reliance.
Through this, children from poor, food insecure background are assured of one meal while in school, resulting to improved health and academic performance.
This also enhnaces soil and water management, waste management and increase in number of tree seedling planted, hence attracting birds, monkeys and insects.
Classifications
Region
Scale of implementation
Ecosystem
Theme
Sustainable development goals
Aichi targets
Challenges
Social Challenges
- Hunger/ food insecurity.
- Unemployment among youths
- school drop out due to lack of food/ feeding program
Environmental Challenges
- Loss of biodiversity
- Low agro biodiversity
Economic
Poverty due to poor production
Beneficiaries
1. school going children
2. Teachers
2. youth out of school
3. parents/surrrounding community members through peer to peer.
How do the building blocks interact?
needs assessment for facilitators
needs assessment for beneficiaries
capacity building on use of Integerated Land Use Design( ILUD) tool
Implemetation, participatory monitoring and evaluation
Impacts
Through this Integrated Land Use Design Approach, we have seen great improvement in,
- Land restoration and utilization for food production of healthy safe and nutritious food
- Adoption of land use methods that help in climate change adaptation and mitigation
- Increased access to food by school children and teachers
- Increased retention of children in school, resulting to improved academic performance
Improved school environment with diversity of food crops in the food forest, which is also home for birds and insects
Story
Sarah Boro, a teacher in Ikuma primary school, which works with SCOPE Kenya, is a happy woman today. In 2015, she attended one week training in permaculture practices in her school.Though initially she had no interest in agricultural activities becasuse, she found it very expensive, involving hard labour and low returns. This time on noting that, permaculture is about designing and establishing sustainable production systems, using local available resources, she found it worthy trying, as it could enable her produce own food.
In her school, she learnt how to produce food and especially vegetables and arrow roots using rain runoff. Back at home, she established her own vegetable gardens arrow root gardens .
Since then, she has moved from buying to sellings, as she produces enough vegetables and arrow roots for her own consuption and sells to neighbouring communities.
on the other hand, she has become a community trainer, as majority of people from her community, comes for consultion over the weekend.
Pictures
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