Creating Solutions for Household Food Security
Esther was recruited for training when EPTF went to Wetta to conduct the Climate Resilience Adaptation Livelihoods (CRAL) farmers’ capacity building. Despite both her and her son being willing to attend the trainings, only one representative per household in the CRAL model was trained with the belief that the knowledge gained would be transferred to those in the home.
Esther Syombua Muteti is 58 years old, married, and living in Wetta area in Mango sub-location, Mwala Sub County. She is a mother of five children, a son and four daughters. After her daughters got married, Esther was left with her 65 year old husband and her youthful 35 year old son and his family at the homestead.
Being an active farmer, Esther walked from the furthest distance in Mango to attend trainings in Wetta, never missing a training unless with permission and with a genuine reason. Esther felt that since she was getting elderly and her son being younger with a lot more energy, she was in a better place to learn from the trainings and once she got back home, train her son, David Muteti, on what she learnt so that they could implement the lessons together on the farm. David had a family and his children were at different stages of schooling, and he was in dire need of an income to help him provide adequately for them.
Wetta is a dry area and due to challenges of getting water, the two combined their effort and bought a water pumping machine to pump water to a farm they had leased near a river. Additionally, they dug a water pan and cemented it, giving it time to set before the rainy season to enable them to tap water. The one acre piece of land that they leased was being used to grow tomatoes, capsicum and maize.
Due to the water pan functioning well, Esther and David are now farming in their homestead with the irrigation water from the already rain harvested water. David has a daughter in college and when they were visited by the EPTF officer, he said that he had now been able to raise his daughter’s school fees without much struggle as compared to before due to his ability to farm and sell his produce using climate smart methods he had learnt. Esther’s neighbors are also learning from her farming and implementing what she does on their farms as well.
In her homestead, Esther has a spinach and onions kitchen garden, from which she gets her vegetables. From the CRAL training, Esther has learnt how to make her own compost manure, mulch, and crop rotate to enhance the soil mineral and moisture content in the farm, enable them to get more produce from the farm. Currently, Esther is a happy woman who is getting enough food from her farm and an income from the surplus produce that she sells. When it comes to the cooking, Esther uses her own made charcoal briquettes from the knowledge she got from EPTF trainings, significantly lowering her fuel cost. She learned the importance of conserving the environment and has been planting more trees in her farm.
Apart from conservation Agriculture training, Syombua attended entrepreneurship training and
The lessons that the CRAL team has learned from working with Esther, and others in the Mwala community, is that as they build the capacity of a few farmers, many others are tapping into the lessons through knowledge and skills sharing even though they were not part of the lot trained. This can be clearly seen with how Esther transferred her new knowledge and skills to her son, who eagerly implemented the new knowledge and the results are visible.
