Milestone

Moses finally finished the training and demonstration for composting and double digging. This is intended to increase the fertilization of soil without creating financial burden for the farmers. It’s a huge milestone for us. The farmers asked a lot of questions during the class. Moses also managed to conduct the elections of group leader, secretary and treasurer. We hope that by establishing the group and its leadership, the farmers will be able to motivate each other and eventually develop a way to pull the resources and efforts together to address other issues they may have, such as buying vaccination for pigs. The village has never had a group before so I anticipate some bumps down the road.

I am also evaluating the feasibility of a “train the trainers” program. Since many poor farmers are strapped for time, many could not make it to all of our training sessions. My idea is to recruit some farmers who completed the training on composting and other farming techniques. They will be tasked and incentivized for teaching fellow farmers who missed training due to distance, time constraint, lack of motivation or other issues. This would help expand our program to make sure more farmers can benefit from our training, especially those who are the poorest of the poor, but also provide a way for some farmers to earn extra income from teaching. I am very excited about this idea but plan to discuss this with some locals to see if it makes sense for them.

Tanzania, Africa