Work has started on an AP-supported kitchen garden at Bungule Comprehensive School, meaning that all eight of our partner schools will soon have the potential to grow their own food.
Given it is the school with the best and most reliable supply of water it is perhaps a little ironic that it is the last of our partner schools where we have supported a kitchen garden space. But if the project can be successful at a school dependent entirely on rainwater (as is the case at Ngambenyi) then there should be no excuses at Bungule, which benefits from a plentiful supply of water from the mountain!!
Parents are clearing an area of ground behind and around the kitchen (the blue and white building) at Bungule.
The kitchen gardens across our other seven partner schools are at various different stages of development, with some yet to have anything in the ground but others (particularly some of the more established ones) producing an abundance and wide variety of greens and vegetables to supplement lunctime meals.
But these spaces are more than just about the food they can produce though, which sadly will never be sufficient for the schools to entirely sustain themselves, as one headteacher explains:
“The kitchen garden, nurtured by African Promise’s support, not only supplements our food programme but also serves as a practical learning tool for the students, instilling in them a sense of responsibility and environmental stewardship.”
Crops harvested from school kitchen gardens just in the last couple of weeks includes tomatoes, peppers, carrots, aubergine and ocra, as well as leafy greens.
We have now donated materials and funds worth KES 1.6m (around £10,000) towards these kitchen gardens, a comparatively minor investment for something with the potential for such significant impact.
In part to support the irrigation of these gardens we are simultaneously helping to significantly increase rainwater harvesting potential and water storage capacity at our partner schools, using funds donated to our BigGive Christmas Challenge campaign and raised by our junior ambassador, Freya Hyslop, from her ‘February Freeze’ fundraiser.
These tanks donated to Rukanga & Bungule are amongst tanks with a total capacity of nearly 200,000 litres donated to six partner schools in the last couple of months.