Nutritional Gardening

Community gardening has long since been recognized as a means to enhance food security and improve nutrition in general and is thus an additional food source for times in the year when field crops are not grown. So therefore gardening tends to be seasonal from a cultural perspective, whereby field crops of maize, sorghum, groundnuts etc are the focus during the rainy season and gardening during the winter and dry months.

Photo 1.Harvest in a community garden

The Kariba REDD+ Project has provided support to a total of 24 gardens with 7 of these being school gardens across the project area because agriculture is part of the teaching curriculum and previously it was a purely theoretical exercise without hand-on work. The support has been in the form of trainings, assorted seed packs, wire for fencing, basic chemicals for pests, cement,  hand water pumps with piping, large plastic water storage tanks, drip irrigation kits etc. The most note-worthy achievement has been of a particular garden in Hurungwe called the Tashinga garden whose members have also been supporting 10 orphans with school fees from the sale of their produce. A total of over 3000 people have been impacted directly and indirectly from the nutrition gardens. 

Map 1. Location of community gardens in the Eastern part of the project
Map 2. Location of community gardens in the Western part of the project
Map 3. Distribution of beneficiaries of community gardens activities implemented per ward
Photo 2. Training on improved agriculture