Climate Action in Education: Planting 10,000 Trees

Mini Botanical Garden Update:

RKF's mini Botanical Garden is complete! And we're only sharing a sneak peak of the before and after here. We are so excited to share a comprehensive video of the entire journey of converting this backyard space into a colourful garden where students from different schools can come and learn about Climate Action and what role each and every one of us has to play to keep our planet going!

New Veggie Patch:

 A community that grows vegetables together, stays together!

The area which we turned into our vegetable patch was formerly being used as a dump site to throw and burn trash.

It was the ideal place to plant vegetables because of the sunlight it received throughout the day and also the fertile ground which had all kinds of compost accumulated through the years.

We started with levelling and getting rid of any trash that wasn’t reusable. Here at RKF, we believe nothing goes to waste if it can be re-used, hence we used bamboo to raise the ground and iron sheets to ensure that the soil doesn’t erode.

And now we have 4 beautiful looking patches with at least 25 different varieties of fruit and vegetable seedlings that include spinach, herbs (like rosemary, fenugreek, basil), strawberries, carrots, cucumbers, pumpkin, Swissh Chard, okra and tomatoes to name a few! Space doesn’t matter, it’s what you decide to do with it that does.

As Covid cases in Kisumu are currently on the decline, we are hoping to start our weekly workshops with students and we are so excited to share updates from these workshops in the coming months.

A Story from Lucas:

We have a new gardener among us!

Lucas joined our team to help us finish our mini botanical garden and he has been witness to the growth of several plants, whether from seeds or cuttings! He has, himself, planted several seedlings in the garden.

He is as excited as we are when there’s a new flower blooming or a new vegetable growing.

“My favorite part of the garden is the Mboga Bags because so much can be planted in such a small space. It can also be a source of income generation.”

With the experience he has had here, he plans on “starting a small farm back at home and also teaching his community how to grow vegetables and flowers to make their homes beautiful.”

Photo Contest:

Drumroll, please...

Out of 400+ entries, The Rahul Kotak Foundation was selected as a #GGPhotoContest finalist for the 3rd year in a row—and we need your help to win up to $1,000 in support of COVID-19 Relief to families in marginalized communities.

VOTING IS NOW OPEN!

The Story behind this photo: Smiles that Shine

There are countless instances worth capturing in a bustling classroom. This one is our favourite! Meet the boys of St. Vitalis Nang’a Primary School, who were absolutely overjoyed after receiving a new set of books and stationery!

At the start of our reading and storytelling workshop, the children were particularly quiet and shy. Gradually, they began opening up to us as we enacted fairy tales to them. By the end of our workshop, the children in this classroom were ecstatically chanting ‘Kitabu Changu, Haki Yangu’ – ‘My Book, My Right.’

And this Memorable Moment was recently selected as a Finalist in GlobalGiving's Annual Photo Contest! 

Links:

• VOTE NOW! Our Photo is a FINALIST!!
• Support our Project to Keep Planting Trees...

Mboga Bags

During last year’s Climate Action Campaign, we were able to raise a small seed fund to start a vertical gardening project for families that had been adversely affected by the floods and the onset of COVID. The project has specifically been designed for families living in small, crowded spaces in informal settlements where there is very little scope to plant your own food.

Through a successful pilot program, we were able to create 5 vertical gardening sacks that our team fondly calls mboga (vegetables in Swahili) bags to kick-off RKF’s first kitchen garden. With a small space and few requirements, these bags produce a very high yield! They are also organic and eco-friendly which makes them a perfect fit for our Environment Project. 

In this report, we wanted to share the journey of creating these mboga bags. It took our team two days to get the bags up and standing with seedlings planted inside them. These included sukuma wiki (collard greens) and spinach which are Kenyan staples that majority of households consume in their daily diet. Alongside that, we have also planted coriander, spring onions, carrots, onion and parsley on top of the bags as supplementary vegetables/herbs that enhance any food! After weeks of caring for these mboga bags, we were able to enjoy our first harvest of spinach just a few days ago.

Unfortunately, due to the rising cases of COVID amidst Kenya’s third wave, we have had to postpone all in-person workshops to May. In the upcoming weeks, when we can have workshops, students will be able to learn how to re-create these mboga bags in their communities and take these harvests back to their schools to encourage fellow students to take part and show what they can achieve in a small space. With the increasing adverse economic impact of the pandemic, especially for those that rely on daily wages and live in slums and informal settlements, food insecurity remains a challenge that most people are struggling with. Our hope is that these bags will act as a substantial and sustainable way to tackle this and generate small savings on vegetables.

Here’s what Teacher Anne had to say about these bags when she saw them: “It’s a wonderful project and we are looking forward to introducing it to our Agriculture club in school. The students can definitely benefit from it and diets can be improved during lunches! These bags are very effective for family consumption also, I would have one in my home.”

Our hope is to scale this program and create at least 100 such bags in schools and local communities in the next year, should we have your support in the upcoming Climate Action Campaign.

Climate Action Campaign 2021

Our Environment Project got selected to participate (with 100 other incredible projects) for GlobalGiving's Climate Action Camapign from 19th -23rd April 2021 where all donations up to US$100 will be matched by 100% effectively doubling your donation and impact!! This is a very rare instance in which such a high matching is available and it is the only campaign this year that will receive such a high matching.

This wil help us build our Environment project and enable us to plant thousands of tress across Kisumu County. We have started building a curriculum with the support of students, teachers and environmental enthusiasts and activists from the region that will provide students with practical, actionable steps on how to care for our planet today and in the future. From creating vertical gardening bags, to tree planting (ensuring they survive and mature) and learning about the importance of recycling, our Environment Program aims to offer a wide range of skills and workshops for students.

Garden Progress and Delays in Workshops

In our previous report, we had shared that we were working on making changes to the backyard to create a mini botanical garden that will be the primary site for conducting workshops during the pandemic. We have now completed building flower beds and a pergola that are ready for planting. We’re so excited to plant several trees, shrubs and flowers on Earth Day next week and finish the garden! And the long rains have also arrived in Kisumu which has made all of us really happy.

Unfortunately, as Kenya is going through a third wave of COVID infections, we have put a pause on all in-person workshops to maintain the safety of our team, volunteers and all the students who would have attended workshops this month. We are hoping to resume these in May in a safe way should the number of cases drop to a 5% threshold.

An Update from our COVID Relief Work

Our team has been reflecting on the past year and the work we've been able to do to provide relief to famillies who continue to be affected by the ongoing pandemic. None of which would have been possible without your incredible support! More than 86,000 meals served and nearly 1,000 families reached during this time. Thank you for being a part of this work! We continue to remain in awe of this support.

Links:

• Our COVID Relief Project