Help Families Grow their Own Food in Rural Haiti

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For the last few months, Lambi has been supporting several organizations in the Southern department through an Agricultural Credit project. The main objective of this project is to enable the peasant organizations to produce more food at home to deal with hunger that threatens the population in the different villages where they are established.

This project is currently being implemented in 2 parts.

The first part was launched at the end of 2021 (November-December 2021) and supported 342 planters from 16 Peasant Organizations. the money spent for this program is 6,840,000.00 gourdes

Each beneficiary member received between 10 thousand and 20 thousand goudes to buy the agricultural inputs needed to set up the fields but also organized konbit (community work project) with other members of the organization to do all the work necessary for the planting (preparing the soil, sowing the seeds, weeding, watering, harvesting,… etc).

Lambi provides these supports at the time of the planting seasons where there is a lot of rain so that the planters can get as much yield as possible from the fields they achieve.

Peasant crops are varied depending on the season (there are at least 2 planting seasons / year) but also on the location (depending on whether they are in the mountains or in the plains and their small micro-climates). In some areas peasants plant corn, millet, beans, peanuts, cassava, yams, but in other areas there are more marshy crops such as spinach, peas, peppers, tomatoes.

The first planting season (December-March) is over and all the beneficiaries of the first part of the project have harvested. It was agreed that the first beneficiary would have to repay half of the loan to be used to make loans for new members. Members abided by their commitments -  March-April was considered the repayment period and new members are joining the project.

Each project organization started with 20-22 members. After the first harvests and reimbursements there are about 8 additional members joining the project.

But overall, according to all the beneficiaries, the project so far has responded to its purpose and has a very positive impact for the members and for the beneficiary peasant organization. The following are noted as positive points in the reports sent to them:

• More food is available in the communities and in the families of the beneficiaries

• Members of the Organization eat part of the crop and sell the other part so that they can raise money to meet the needs of their families (pay for school, care for their children, etc.)

• foto_pou_rapo_GG_a.docx (DOCX)

In the Southern Department, where the earth shook on August 14, 2021, Lambi has served about 60 grassroots organizations  established throughout 11 communes (averaging about 100 members per organization). Almost all of these organizations contacted the Lambi Fund for assistance as they are accustomed to doing in the event of natural disasters. This disaster set many projects, activities and evaluations behind as it led to worse roadways than before and much flooding cutting off access to our partners.  Altough the damage was major, it did not stop our partners or us from pushing through.

As part of our emergency relief project, Phase 1 was the immediate humanitarian emergency response. More than 2,209 members from 34 Organizations participated in this program. Each Organization received 500,000.00 Haitian Gourdes (htg), but only 2 of them received 250,000.00 htg each. In total, the Lambi Fund spent 14,865,000.00 htg for this first phase. It was completed in September where beneficiaries used the money that they received to buy food, water, tarps and some 2x4 wood to deal with the difficulties they were facing at the time and build temporary shelter for their families.

Lambi is also currently monitoring 16 environmental (10 nurseries), livestock, agricultural and community credit projects in the Southern and Artibonite Departments. Some of these projects launched 2 years ago with 4 of them currently approaching completion.

An astonishing 300,000 seedlings are in the process of production. We have 6 community credit  or ox-plows projects, which also include an environmental aspect where a total of 100,000 seedlings are being produced. Distribution has already begun to members so that they can plant in their fields and further protect their land by creating small community forests.

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