From the coast to informal settlements: Kenya learning tour

Dorcas Muia in her kitchen garden

\We left the ocean beauty of Watamu on Friday morning to board a coaster bus bound inland. Some of our Rep colleagues elected to have their mothers and kids skip this long drive and fly directly to Nairobi. But most of us settled in for what was to be about 10 hours of driving through increasingly arid landscapes heading northwest to the city. Our group included International Program Director Rebecca with her husband Blaine; Area Director Wawa;  regional staff members Milkah (finance), Mercy (HR), David (Peace-building and Advocacy), Kelly (Connecting peoples and Admin); and several fellow reps: Samuel and Winfred (from Uganda, serving in Chad), Semei (from Uganda, serving in South Sudan), Fred and Betty (from Kenya, serving in Uganda) and all three of us Mosleys.

Zoe and Sheila

We noted an effort at road construction to widen the Nairobi-Mombasa highway. But most of the road is just two lanes that accommodate all truck traffic between the major East African port and multiple destinations inland as far as DR Congo. A driver must be both aggressive and alert at all times to safely navigate the frequent overtaking of slow trucks that line up one after another. It was usually better not to watch the road ahead. Instead, we looked out the windows and watched the changing landscape. The large, organized fields of sisal plants (used for fiber to make rope) were particularly striking. We caught sight of a few zebras as we neared Tsavo National Park and enjoyed the dramatic hills around Voi. By evening we had reached Kibwezi town, where MCC Colleagues James, Charles, and two young adults Zoe and Sheila (2 young adult MCC volunteers visiting from Tanzania), awaited us.

Surprise birthday for Milkah

We quickly found our rooms and then met up in the hotel conference room to get a briefing on the UDO project, Nature Positive Solutions for Climate Change Resilient Communities. It’s a huge project with numerous activities, generous funding from the Canadian government, and lots of room to ask questions. But finally dinner was ready and we wrapped up the official talk and turned to enjoying more informal conversation with the UDO staff. As we finished our dinner, we suddenly realized there was another surprise birthday party in store for us! Milkah, the regional finance officer, was hoping to turn 50 without anyone noticing, but she had no idea that there were spies who knew her secrets and wanted to celebrate with her. She is a very humble and discreet person and was quite overcome with emotion! Finally, we slept.

Group photo on the high point

In the morning, we woke up early to board the bus and then drive to the highest point of the project area in Kikumbulyu North. We scrambled up a steep hillside to the top of a rock where we could look over the entire landscape for a physical overview of the project area. We learned how it connects to the project areas of 3 other NGO partners who are cooperating in a similar intervention. When we descended, we planted five trees to represent the countries where we serve: Kenya, USA, Uganda, South Sudan, and Chad. I was a litt
le distracted at that point because it was the Audubon October Big Day (when people all over the world try to count as many birds as possible), and I’d just spotted a new species to add to my life list: the D’Arnaud’s Barbet. Really fun!!

Next we visited a farmer, Dorcas Muia, and learned about the variety of ways she is taking on Nature+ in her farm. Her VSLA had also worked together to treat us to some local cake, one made of millet and one made of sorghum, baked over a fire. It was a legitimate and delicious, and nutritious cake!

We could have spent all day with her, asking questions and learning about her approaches, but we had to move on to visit a Village Savings and Loan Group nearby (see the longer project overview below for more details). As the bus pulled up, we saw a huge group of people, 50 or more, lined up at the gate to greet us, singing and dancing in a joyfully rowdy way. 

VSLA dancing welcome

We disembarked and then realized that various individuals were being invited to introduce ourselves by joining in the dancing. It was quite funny and ridiculous – none of us were as good at the moves as the people of Kikumbulyu. And then the song changed, and we all danced into the compound with joy and vigorous movement.

From there, we sat with the VSLA for the next two hours, learning about how they worked together and hearing testimonies of the effectiveness of taking out loans and growing their farms. We also heard how they interacted with various project staff and with the lead farmers and gender champions who were recruited from within the community. 

A lead farmer and UDO staff Susan

We shared lunch with them and had additional time to ask questions. The full report of the experience with a lot more personal detail is below. After the VSLA presentation finished, we had an additional tour around the compound of our host, David Kiema, and his wife, Gladys Muoka. He’s a retired teacher with grown children who are working, so he is one of the more well-off members of the community, with enough space to host the VSLA meeting. He has been able to establish a large citrus orchard, a field with Zaipits, a kitchen garden, and an azolla pond, along with a huge modern chicken house.

James and David

We wrapped up the evening back at our hotel with a final debrief with UDO and then dinner. Our son David had become a bit impatient during the long day visit: he had some big homework assignments to finish because of all the school days he’d missed while we were at the beach, and so he was hard at work on a French comic book project before we departed. Our team met Sunday morning for a brief time of worship and reflection in the garden of the Kambua resort. It felt like a welcome moment to stop and breathe and consider all the ways that our partner UDO and the community are doing the work of Jesus’ Kingdom, healing landscapes and families, delivering people from unfruitful pursuits and exploitation, prophesying in visions of a green land, and bringing justice to vulnerable people.

Then it was back in the car to drive to Nairobi, while others continued in the bus. We had a good time debriefing with our staff member James, who has the longest history with the project. He was able to answer a lot of background questions that had come up for us in seeing the project afresh. In the end, we made it home by about 1 pm and felt very good about having half a day to recover from all the travel.

MIDI staff in front of Amos' hayfield

On Monday morning, we had to rise early again for another partner visit. This time, we picked up Zoe and then joined the team in the town of Ngong, about an hour from Nairobi. We were hosted by staff of Maasai Integrated Development Initiatives (MIDI), who have been a partner with MCC since 2002. They gave us a great introduction to their program of promoting climate-resilient livelihood options. They also center their approach on the Village Savings and Loan Associations, a methodology they learned about together with UDO in 2017. From there, individuals make decisions about how to focus their small business development. Most participants are women, and they started out with traditional small businesses like making soap and creating beaded jewelry for sale. But group members are now including other agricultural interventions as well, something new for the Maasai, who are traditionally pastoralists.

Alice, Zoe and Amos
by haybales

To illustrate their project approach, we drove about 30 minutes out of the town towards rural Kajiado County. Just off the tarmac road, we stopped at the farm of Alice and Amos Kinayim. They are a middle aged couple, with 7 children, and are part of the Omom sisters VSLA. Historically, Amos’ father had hundreds of cattle and goats. According to traditional Maasai practice, when there was drought, the men would take the herds farther away from town to better grazing lands. Such migration was only necessary, perhaps once every five years. Since the 90’s, droughts have been happening every other year. New land policies have resulted in land demarcation and fencing all over Kenya. Maasai herdsmen have to basically walk their herds on main roads through the city and out the other side to find open grazing land. In 2022, there was a severe drought. Amos moved his herds to Naivasha. He sold goats to try to buy fodder to keep his cows alive, but he still lost 8 cattle to hunger, along with the loss of the sold goats. It was a bitter lesson that it’s not possible to keep large herds alive anymore in an unpredictable climate. 

Omom sisters VSLA

Now he keeps 7 cows, and he has moved into the haybaling business. He fenced off a large section of land, clearing it of brush and rocks, and he allows the natural grasses to grow during the rainy season. This past year, the family took a loan from their VSLA and rented a tractor to cut the bales. Amos was able to harvest 900 bales of hay, selling 300 bales at 500 Kes each for a profit. He was easily able to pay off the loan and keep 600 bales as part of his new zero-grazing plan for his cattle. He has a dream of buying a bigger brush cutter in the future, so that they can cut the hay into smaller pieces for cattle to use more efficiently. As we looked over his hay field, golden dry ahead of the rainy season, we saw a herd of giraffes browsing among the bushy acacia forest just on the other side of his fence. Throughout the day, they came and went out of sight in the tiny remaining portion of their breeding grounds; fencing and new housing developments have made life much harder for giraffes as well as pastoralists. Amos also said that the new approach of feeding his cattle from haybales has really improved his family life. Now he doesn’t need to migrate with the livestock but can stay at home with his family, working on their income-generating activities around the homestead.

Alice at her farm

Alice has also been learning new approaches to making a living through her VSLA. She decided to establish a large kitchen garden right next to her house. She didn’t even use sacks, but planted spinach and kale directly in the ground. Most farmers would not have enough water available to keep vegetables alive except in a few small sack gardens, but Alice is making the most of proximity to a government water line that runs right next to their property. They also raise onions and herbal medicine in their garden and have been able to general profit through the vegetables. One of her older daughters paid for this semester of university education by selling kale. Another of her girls has gotten into soap-making to pay for her education.

Young, educated women serve as officers,
keeping written records 

We walked into the next compound and sat with the VSLA Omom Sisters to learn more about their group and their successes and challenges. This group is in their third cycle, and they are preparing for the share-out at the end of November, where they distribute all the collected savings and interest to each woman according to the number of shares she's purchased over the year. They have grown to trust one another and moved from a share price of 50 Kes to 100 Kes, so that each woman can save up to 500 Kes a week. One of the most common reasons that women take loans is to pay for school fees for their children and dependents. Every single woman was supporting a child in school, demonstrating how valuable education is to them now. 

The Chairperson, Margaret Kuku, spoke about the impact the VSLA has had on her life. She is an older person and decided to take a loan to build a small house and then rent it out. As soon as she was able to start collecting rent, she took a loan to build another house. She is now the landlord of 5 houses and has a secure income for herself into retirement. She has also used some of the loan money to buy a tank to place next to her house for rainwater harvesting.

Some of our MCC team members were very interested to learn more about the impact of VSLAs in gender relations. Clearly, women are now in charge of income-generating activities. They are making financial decisions. They are even owning and raising livestock (poultry), something that was unheard of in traditional Maasai culture. 

We asked how their men are receiving these changes. One of the women responded immediately: “God has come back!” Now Maasai men discuss finances with their wives. When a man wants to take his kids to school, he knows that he needs to come closer to his wife to cooperate. “This makes our families stronger, making decisions together.”

The group had prepared lunch for us to share with them, and then after that, we were able to admire some of their amazing beaded creations and buy pieces as a colorful memory to take back, also offering additional support and encouragement to the women in their small businesses.

Briefing at Lions' clinic

On the Tuesday of the learning tour, we turned our sights away from the countryside and entered the urban realities of Nairobi. Our first stop was Eastleigh Fellowship Center (a Kenya Mennonite ministry), where we met up with the staff of the Center for Peace and Nationhood (CPN). They gave us a tour of their facility and talked about the various development projects they have been involved with through MCC support. And then we headed out to the nearby informal settlement, Mathare, to visit a maternal child health project and a peace project.

The MCH project has its home base at a local Lions clinic. The government hires Community Health Promoters as part of its’ regular plan to work on public health; the MCC-supported project adds a stipend so that these promoters have communication and transport funds to reach the target group: pregnant and lactating women, and women under 25 with children under 5 years. 

CPN staff with a promoter

The promoters are trained in a specific curriculum on MCH. They go into the community and invite eligible women to form care groups of 10-15 members. Each care group chooses a leader or volunteer. Then the promoter meets with her group of 10 – 15 volunteers to train them on the week’s lesson. Then each volunteer goes out to her own group to share the same material with them.

Jesca training volunteers

We got a live demonstration of the whole process out in the community. Our smaller group of 6 followed CPN staff member Winnie out of the clinic compound and into the narrow alleyways of Mathare. She kept cutting right and left in narrower and narrower streets, with high-rises on either side, until we stepped into an alley where about ten women were sitting against a wall on a bench. More women kept joining us, and so we had to arrange ourselves, a bit awkwardly, straddling a pedestrian thoroughfare. The health promoter, Jesca Norah, got right into the lesson with her volunteers, greeting the women by name and then moving on to the week’s lesson: Danger signs in pregnancy. The volunteers looked young – probably none of them was over 25. Most held babies, and some were also pregnant and dealing with their toddlers. They learned both the material and the pedagogy from Jesca, as she showed them bright pictures in a laminated flipbook. Many people passed up and down the alley, carrying buckets of watermelon or tea for sale, but the women were not distracted at all – they seemed to be very accustomed to a hectic environment. A few of them spoke great English and let us know that they really needed help to improve their socio-economic situation, along with their health. It's hard for them to find work to pay rent and buy food as young single mothers.

Care group in action

After about 45 minutes, we moved on to meet one of the grassroots care groups. It was even more difficult to find the meeting spot or base for this group. Here the houses were single-story and basic. This group also met on either side of a walking path with a sewage ditch running right down the middle. Very young women, mostly under 20, were sitting on the foundation ledge of one house. Their volunteer leader, Jane Mawire, also looked very young and quite nervous to be leading a session in the presence of a bunch of strangers. However, she took a deep breath, gathered herself and dove right in. 

Another volunteer teaching her peers

She led a review of danger signs in pregnancy, ably involving each of the other women in her group in recalling what they’d learned the previous week. Then she moved on to the new lesson. In spite of her circumstances as a teenage single parent, it was clear that she is a woman with capacity and potential. She did a wonderful job eliciting discussion from her group, with encouragement and just a little coaching from the health promoter Evaline Wambui. This week's lesson was on male involvement in pregnancy and birth – it seems to be very hard for women to ask for any kind of help from the men around them, whether it is the father of their child, or their own father or sibling. They concluded that the best thing to do was just sweet-talk a man into accompanying them to the clinic for regular antenatal visits so that they might be taken more seriously. These women have a tough situation in life with few options for work, but they have also grown in healthy social relationships and support with other women in similar circumstances.

Finally, we returned to the health clinic to meet two women’s care groups that had also adopted a self-help savings approach. They are not able to save nearly the amounts that the rural groups could, and they don’t yet have a good method of extending credit. But they still feel good about meeting and sharing with one another. We had a debrief time on the MCH project over lunch and then went on to visit a peace club back in Mathare.

Judith, MCC Kenya staff

Right before we got to the host school, the bus was held up on a narrow street due to a community altercation. As far as I could see, it involved an ethnically motivated dispute between Somali immigrants and Kenyan citizens regarding the proper way to park cars in the street. The tension between different groups of long-time residents and recent immigrants characterizes the kinds of conflicts that destabilize informal settlements. Ethnic tensions are overlaid with religious and political ones, as most Somalis are also Muslim. 

Peace club students meeting Rebecca B

We decided to just get off the bus, walk past the altercation and head into Penuel Education Center, the host institution for one of 7 peace clubs in the neighborhood. This remarkable school started out as an adult education center for Somali migrants who came to Nairobi to sell livestock, and then ended up staying for extended periods. Over the years, it has remained a church school, but the majority of the learners are Somali Muslims, enrolled by parents who want their kids to understand the culture and languages of their new host country. 

Understanding emotions

About 50 children were already seated in a classroom when we arrived, and so we slipped into a couple of rows of chairs behind them. They knew they should sit still and behave and face forward, but they all were eager to repeatedly turn around and sneak a look at our curious group of visitors. There was this electric sense of meeting the gazes and the smiles of one child after another, and seeing a person in the other. We participated in their peace club lesson, about how it's important to understand emotions (our own and those of others) in order to avoid conflict and misunderstanding. And then we all went outside for a huge group photo and some informal conversations. I was reminded later that the school's name, "penuel," is Hebrew for "face of God" and it recalls the moment when Jacob wrestled at night with an angel but then came away with a profound encounter with the divine following a huge conflict. It felt to me like, in the faces of these young humans from a different faith who pray for peace, we were also seeing the face of God. 

Penuel peace club

We made our final partner visit on Wednesday morning to the Victorious Learning Center. It's a ministry of the local Mennonite Church in Embakasi, providing quality, holistic education to children in a very vulnerable community. This institution also hosts a maternal-child health project following the care group model. We had the usual briefing on the project, ably assisted by Eyasu, one of our young adult volunteers who does IT support and also assists with some classes. The other volunteer, Selam, is a nurse who is serving as the school nurse, running a health club and helping with the MCH project. The most fun part of the day was watching the children perform various modern and traditional dances, along with poetry recitation. 

Unfortunately, the whole day was overshadowed by the death of Former Vice President Raila Odinga of a heart attack in India at age 80. He has been a major force in Kenyan politics for decades, always fighting for democracy, and was a symbol of hopes deferred for many Kenyans. Apparently, he was imprisioned and tortured by a much earlier regime, suffered great health consequences, and yet went on to contest for the presidency over and over for years. 

We are still trying to understand the new context where we live, and so were a bit surprised by the waves of grief that overcame the county over the next days. When the plane bearing his body arrived at the airport on Thursday morning, the crowd of mourners absolutely overwhelmed security, and thousands of people flooded over gates and walls to meet the plane, touch the coffin and weep for "Baba." There were security issues and massive crowds that accompanied the motorcade to the public viewing. Suddenly, branches of respect and mourning were afixed on the front of nearly every vehicle, from motorbikes to large trucks. I found myself grateful that God apparently thought I should join the signs of respect, and provided a branch which strategically on the front of our vehicle where it stayed attached to the air filter for several days. 

Bonus photos:

Two Rebeccas

Steep descent from the rock

CPN staff Mary and MCC Kenya staff Nelly

For all the really high-quality photos in this blog, credit goes to David Waiswa, MCC East Africa and Sahel Regional Peacebuilding and Advocacy coordinator. Our good camera is currently inoperable. 

and here is a more detailed description of our visit to the Nature Postive project for those interested: 

How do you heal a landscape? 

You begin with the people.  

The Nature Positive Food Systems for Climate Change Adaptation (Nature+) Project in Kikumbulyu North, Makueni County, Southeastern Kenya, includes a dizzying kaleidoscope of approaches and strategies, arranged in three pillars: Nature Based Solutions, Livelihoods initiatives and Governance structures. But the engine driving the impact of the project lies in the 131 community groups, VSLAs, which are meeting together, learning together, reinforcing social cohesion, creating wealth and building vision for a future where every family has enough.  

Planting a tree

Yes, the project started with a technical investigation. Staff and consultants walked transect lines and completed a variety of environmental and social assessments. This section of the Athi River watershed is extremely dry; on the surface, it looks like a lost cause when it comes to soil fertility, erosion, deforestation, and general environmental degradation. Four local NGOs joined forces to work on either side of the river to try to restore this section of the landscape. Utooni Development Organization has worked with MCC since 2002 and has built up a track record of effective interventions for water harvesting and climate-smart conservation agriculture. They were an ideal partner to join the CFGB-led consortium of organizations working together in Kenya, while other consortiums were formed in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, all with a similar mission to transform landscapes (funding for all coming from Government Affairs Canada through CFGB).  

In fact, landscape restoration is not just about the land: it’s about every aspect or feature of the landscape, from the topography like hills and rivers; to the human settlements, schools, farms, roads and markets; to biodiversity, including insects, shrubs, trees, domestic animals and wildlife. The question is: how can these people living in this landscape find ways to nurture the land and at the same time address their problems of food insecurity and poverty? Again, healing the land depends on the choices of the people living in it. 

The first social activities of the project involved sensitizing the villagers. Various parts of the community met for a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). This process helps a community recognize both their shared challenges and their resources and assets. The aim was to include one or more members of every single household in the project somehow.  Interested community members were then invited to assemble in self-help groups (Village Savings and Loans Associations) of about 30 members each.  

In fact, UDO learned about the VSLA methodology back in 2017, when it was part of a previous multi-country CFGB consortium funded by GAC, implementing the SUCA project (Scaling Up Conservation Agriculture). Apart from CFGB, World Vision funded an intensive training for all the SUCA partners in Kenya and Tanzania. MCC was even able to include a non-CFGB partner (MIDI) in the training. VSLAs proved to be incredibly successful in the other rural communities served by UDO and MIDI, and so UDO was eager to bring this impactful approach to Kibwezi with the new Nature+ project.  

VSLA box with record books

The primary stated aim of a VSLA is to help community members save the little money they have, gain access to small loans, and gradually build up their wealth through agricultural income generating projects. Community members are trained and coached by UDO staff, and all the money they save, and loan out, is money they themselves have contributed. Weekly VSLA meetings are also the venue where project staff can teach the gathered farmers about new techniques and best practices to enhance their agricultural productivity. Lead farmers teach and demonstrate how to dig water harvesting structures, or grow azolla in a pond for chicken food, or how to plant profitable fruit trees in an arid environment and keep them alive.  It’s also the place where gender champions talk about the importance of involving all community members (especially women, youth and people living with disabilities) in community decision making.  

VSLAs meet weekly at a set time, and follow a highly structured rhythm of activities, with bylaws to govern the number of shares one can buy, how loans are taken and repaid, what size of loan is allowed, etc. Group members are numbered off, from the Chair, the secretary, the box keeper, two money counters, 3 key holders and then the general membership. Per group protocol, no one is called by name in a meeting. At the beginning of a meeting, the box keeper gets the metal cash box out of hiding. The three key holders open three separate padlocks. Each member’s passbook is stored in the box, so these are distributed. Most groups collect a social fund every week, to help members deal with challenges like illness or bereavement. Then they collect shares (1 to 5) according to the means of the member. Finally, loans are given out or repayments are made. Meetings are very disciplined and conducted mostly in silence. The group establishes fines for various kinds of disruptive behavior: absence, lateness, answering a phone call, and side-talking during a meeting, which normally lasts less than an hour.  

There is a high social cohesion in a group like this, and high motivation to participate as they learn of each other’s success stories and get ideas for their own families. There is no seed money provided by the donor in the VSLA model. Instead, the group gains wealth as loans are repaid with 10% interest and through fines. The members’ contributions during the first three meetings provide capital, allowing members to borrow at least two times the amount of shares one has saved in the kitty.  

At the end of a year-long cycle, there is a share-out. The group will calculate the total amount raised by the group, and each member will be paid out their portion of the profits depending on how many shares they have bought during the year. The more you save, the more you get at the end. The loans and share-outs are very important for community members, especially when it comes to paying school fees for their children. In the past, when they desperately needed cash to pay for education, they were at the mercy of loan sharks who would charge extremely high interest. For these VSLAs, 10% interest is a good deal, and they all know that they will profit from the share-out in the end.  

Here are a few testimonies from the members of Bona na Kwika (seeing and doing) VSLA in Kikumbulyu.  

Albinas Kiyoku is a farmer who also practices beekeeping and poultry rearing. She had a vision for her farm, but not enough money yet to carry it out. Together with her family, she decided to access a loan of 10,000 KES. She used 4000 to buy a sheep for fattening, 3000 to buy 30 young chicks and 3000 for poultry feed. Two months later, she sold the checks to pay off the loan and also pay school fees. She used chicken and sheep manure in her kitchen garden and her CA farm. Her Sheep had a kid and now she also has a second cycle of chicks that she is raising. She recently sold two cocks for 2200 KES, and she used 600 KES of the profits to hire day laborers to dig Zaipits in her farm for water harvesting.  

Margaret Musila is proud to be a member of this VSLA group. She has been a widow for a long time. In the past year, she sat with her children and made some decisions together about how to access credit and what to do. She started by borrowing 5000, to buy 30 chicks and poultry feed. She didn’t yet have a nice poultry house, but 3 months later, she was able to sell 20 of the chicks at 400 Kes each, gaining a profit of 8000 Kes. She used this for school fees and also bought 2 goats. A year later she has 3 kids from those 2 goats. She was able to sell them and service her loan and then take out another 10,000 KES. She decided with her children to work on her farmland, hiring casual labor to scoop terraces to prevent erosion and to dig some zaipits. She got another loan of 20k and decided to buy a water tank for her house to harvest rainwater (17K) using the balance for more work on land preparation. She is now waiting for the rains and hoping for a good harvest.  

Bendetta Bida has benefitted from many trainings offered at her VSLA in agricultural practices: poultry keeping, how to establish a kitchen garden, conservation agriculture (low tillage, mulching & crop rotation), Farmer managed natural regeneration (FMNR)of existing trees. She had land that was very bushy, but together with her husband, she got a loan of 20k. They used 2000 for casual labor to prune the shrubs and then used 3000 to plant grass seed. They also used 10k to buy 2 improved beehives. At the end of the season, they harvested 20 large grass bales, sold 10 bales for 200 kes each and kept 10 to feed their own livestock. They were able to service the loan and took another loan to pay for fencing around their kitchen garden and vegetable seeds. Now they don’t need to buy any vegetables from the market.  

When Eunice Mutuko started with the VSLA, she had no goat. Her husband encouraged her to take out a loan to buy a goat. So she borrowed 10k and bought 2 goats. Each goat has kidded. She borrowed 5k and purchased local chickens. Then she went and got sticks to fence a kitchen garden and is now growing her own vegetables. She has prepared a CA farm, and she is able to get some kind of harvest, even when it is a time of drought.  

Timothy Kenene farms a piece of land that is on high ground and every time it rained, there was tremendous run off and erosion. He constructed terraces on his farm, and it is now regenerating. He dug zaipits and now the farm is doing well.  

 

Gender champions have some challenging counter-cultural work to do with families involved in VSLAs. They invite families to create their own “happy family tree:” a visualization exercise involving drawing on a paper. As part of the exercise, family members have an honest discussion, sitting down together to recognize how they spend their money, and which uses of money really aren’t productive or might bring unhappiness (expensive salon hairstyles, alcohol use, maintaining “side chicks.”) Instead, families are encouraged to invest in projects that will build up the family's wealth and well-being. Numerous VSLA members mentioned how much their family life has improved with this invitation to better communication between husbands, wives, and children. Furthermore, as they see their productive investments paying off in greater food security, they are encouraged to do even more to save and invest. 

 

Farmer Dorcas

NGOs have come and gone with various suggestions for how farmers can improve their yields. Most of the time, the adoption of new techniques is short-lived. One major reason for this is that subsistence farmers have very little margin for error. They do not have extra money to waste on practices that are untested. If a crop fails, they have no extra money to plant again. Their families can literally starve, and they can lose their land, just trying to stay alive. The VSLA approach slowly allows subsistence farmers to accumulate enough surplus wealth to be able to try new practices on parts of their land, starting with just half an acre. As time goes on, they can test for themselves whether the approach is worth investing in on a larger scale on more of their land.  

In the Kikumbulyu community, a large percentage of participants are actually adopting at least 2 out of 3 Conservation agriculture principles on part of their farms. Besides the VSLAs giving farmers margin to experiment, the project has really benefitted from one other historical factor. A portion of this community has been involved in a previous CFGB project (Climate Smart and Livelihoods Project).  Between 2021 and 2024, some community members had already learned about minimum tillage, crop rotation, and mulching and had begun to adopt these techniques on their farms. Around 500 participants from the past project were also included in the new Nature+ project, and they were able to act as yeast in the dough, offering real life examples to their neighbors of how CA techniques work, how profitable water harvesting can be, even if it requires a lot of labor at the outset. Some of these past participants were among the lead farmers who were able to help their neighbors consider adopting novel ideas. Landscape restoration takes decades, not just a few years. The current GAC funding will end in 2026, so we are praying that policy makers will see the importance of continuing to support and deepen the good work that has begun in this community, not cutting it short after just 3 years. 

UDO recognizes that seeing is believing, and so another part of encouraging better climate smart approaches revolves around the Farmer Field Schools. On these special days, community members gather in a model farm and are exposed to a variety of techniques and approaches, seeing them firsthand and working well.  

Our visit to Kikumbulyu also included visits to two specific farmers, to see what parts of the agriculture and livelihoods approaches they had taken on board. Here are some details on one of those farmers. 

Dorcas and her fruit tree nursery

Dorcas Muia is 45 years old. She and her husband have 5 children, but most of them have grown up and completed school. Her husband was earning money for the family through casual labor, collecting water from a borehole some distance away and selling it to his neighbors. In the past, the family relied solely on his unpredictable income, and it was a struggle to feed the children and pay school fees. When the UDO project started in 2023, Dorcas participated in the first sensitization exercises. She was invited on a vision journey: how would she like to see her farm ten years from now? How might she begin to take steps now to reach that vision? 

She had a vision for a farm filled with fruit trees. And so, she began her own small fruit tree nursery in her compound, raising guavas, citrus and neem (a medicinal tree). She’s planted quite a few trees, going slowly so that she can keep tending and watering the ones she has already planted. Water is an issue in the area, so she is careful about how much water she needs to have to maintain the trees she has already planted.  

Last year at a farmer field school, she learned about Azolla, a bright green tiny aquatic fern. This plant propagates very quickly in a small pond and is a highly nutritious source of vitamins and proteins. She planned together with her husband, and they were able to construct a concrete azolla pond on the shady side of her house. Using the tea-bag method, Dorcas puts a bag of manure into the pond to dangle and express nutrients into the water to nurture the azolla. Now she harvests azolla twice a week and uses it to feed her chickens, allowing them to lay eggs with bright yellow yolks. She also uses the azolla to feed her fish – another project she’s developed with her husband in a second pond against the house. The 70 catfish love the green azolla and have grown large and healthy in a small space. Dorcas has regular orders for her fish from a small local hotel restaurant. 

Dorcas' kitchen garden 

As we continued around the perimeter of her house, we came to her kitchen garden, nicely fenced and shaded. Sack gardens were densely packed together and equally packed with thriving spinach, kale, peppers, and coriander (as a deterrent to pests). She has a barrel for water next to the sacks, where she also uses a “teabag” of manure hanging into the bucket to enrich the wastewater she uses to water her vegetables. 

On the other side of her house, she has built a solid chicken house. During an MCC-funded COVID response, she had received a distribution of chicks to boost the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers. Now she has a thriving flock of chickens and has learned how to maintain their health with vaccination and good veterinary practices. She gets eggs for her family, can slaughter a chicken from time to time to improve their diet, and sells chickens when she needs cash. She also has several cows and young calves.  

We walked out to her field to see the innovations she was working on there. Last season, she dug zaipits in one field. It was a very bad season with little rain, but even so, she was able to harvest 20 kg of maize and 50 kg of crawling cowpeas (and the cowpeas also acted as a green manure cover crop around the maize). In the fields she planted using the conventional method, she got no harvest at all. This experience has convinced her that water harvesting works and is important. She is now digging a series of half-moon rainwater harvesting structures in the neighboring field and is waiting for the rains with high hopes. In another field, she is trying hand furrows. She will see which method works the best compared to the effort required.  

Finally, we gazed up into an acacia tree at the log hive balanced high in the branches. Since last year, Dorcas and her husband have decided to include beekeeping in their diversified approach to agriculture. At her VSLA, she received training in beekeeping. Next, they were able to pay for 17 bee hives. She harvested two hives in the middle of the year and got 2L of honey from each, raising 900 Kes per liter. The bees have adequate water because they visit her fish pond. She plans to harvest at the end of the year when the season is done. She anticipates that each hive might yield up to 18 Kg of honey, making this enterprise incredibly profitable for the family. Better yet, they are able to have some honey for their own use.  

All in all, Dorcas is taking on board every aspect of Nature+ training that she can absorb: poultry farming, fruit trees, fish farming, raising azolla, kitchen gardening, conservation agriculture with a variety of water harvesting techniques. We concluded our visit with Dorcas by helping to plant 5 new fruit trees around her house, praying our blessings over her and her family and these trees, trusting that Dorcas, through her hard work and vision,  is one of thousands of farmers who will catch the vision of a greener and more prosperous Kikumbulyu landscape and help to transform it into reality.