Soft Power Education > Projects > Amagezi Education Centre

Agriculture

Enhanced School Gardens – now Agriculture outreach

The original focus of the Soft Power Agriculture Project was the development of the Enhanced School Gardens Project -the project that was started in May 2008 involved promoting sustainable organic farming in both our partner schools and their surrounding communities. However, after the monitoring and evaluation that took place in October 2008, we decided that the Enhanced School Garden Project should be split into two projects, each with a specific target audience. The agriculture outreach team would deliver training in sustainable farming methods to the pupils and teachers at the school sites as part of the Outreach within the Pupils Project and a community agriculture project would be developed with the aim of setting up demonstration gardens in the community to train community members.

Community Agriculture Project

This project was developed out of the Enhanced School Gardens Project. The major problem with using community members to set up a school demonstration garden was that after the training was finished there was no ownership of the school garden. From conducting research and consulting with local communities we decided that setting up demonstration gardens in the community would be a more effective way of training community members in sustainable organic farming.

Kyabirwa Demonstration Garden

In November 2008 we reviewed how the Kyabirwa Demonstration Garden would be utilised. In the past it had been used for training community members in sustainable organic farming methods; however monkey problems and poor seeds served to undermine the success of the method. We decided to put the training aspect on hold and actually focus on getting the demonstration garden up and producing. The aim of setting up the demonstration garden at present is to showcase the benefits of the double digging method whilst also providing food for the pupils when they visit the Amagezi Education Centre.