Both Mukiibi and Ndema describe how the projects they are working on are helping to empower farmers to be better able to provide for themselves, their families, and their communities. In Uganda, the DISC project instills greater environmental awareness and understanding of nutrition, indigenous vegetables, and food culture in Uganda’s youth by establishing vegetable gardens at pre-school, day, and boarding schools.
“Young people are all moving to the town to look for jobs,” says Mukiibi. But for many people in Africa, agriculture is the best means of improving diets and incomes. Mukiibi hopes that by teaching young farmers to appreciate agriculture from a young age, he’ll help to provide them with the tools they’ll need to care for themselves and their families. His work is gaining popularity and momentum. “We started with three schools in 2006 and currently we are working with 17 schools and 13 school gardens,” says Mukiibi. “These gardens have been created and managed by the students, the teachers, and the parents.”
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, women make up 80 percent of small scale farmers, yet often women do not have access to the land, credit or resources they need to feed their families and earn money. FANRPAN’s Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project recently launched a series of Theatre for Policy Advocacy (TPA) campaigns in rural Malawi, using an interactive model to strengthen the ability of women farmers to advocate for better for themselves and their families. ”What we are doing is we are using theater as a way of engaging women farmers as a way of getting involved and getting them to open up about the challenges they are facing, says Ndema.“We want them to be a part of the process of trying to address those challenges.”
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
