If a school in Malawi can find an American partner school (or any other school anywhere in the world that has the means of raising relatively small amounts of dollars/pounds), a few thousand dollars or pounds results in a small fortune for the Malawi school. The exchange rate has fluctuated from around $1 converting to 720-800 Malawian kwatcha over the last three years.
The school can then:
- purchase land for itself near the school; in our case, about 35 acres are now owned by the school, with more being purchased in 2021 in order to expand and help provide food for the community as a whole during the COVID pandemic.
- purchase seed for planting. The staple crop is maize (corn), but several types of beans and sweet potatoes have been successfully grown in our case.
- purchase fertilizer for the land.
- purchase pesticides for the inevitable fight against insects.
- tools for the many students and adults in the community who do all the work to plant, maintain, and harvest the crops. Don't forget, actual tractors have not been part of this effort to date because of cost restrictions and also the fact they are not readily available in Malawi and other poverty-stricken countries even if a school did have the money. All the work is done by those in the school and community, by hand.
- teach the next generation how to do larger-scale farming, even in more challenging weather and environmental periods. The farm has become a focal point to the entire school curriculum, for all ages of students.
- purchase or build storage facilities for the harvests.
- pay for surveys, environmental studies, the planning and construction of irrigation systems. Wells can be dug, solar powered pumping systems can be installed, the water distribution system can be installed out to the crops, and money for maintenance of the irrigation system can be saved.
- depending on the needs of the school and village, chicken coops can be built and chickens raised. In Malawi and other African nations, raising chickens and/or other animals can actually become part of the local economy, with excess eggs being sold to other villages. In our project, raising chickens became a reality with some of the funds.
ALL of this has happened, feeding some 1500 children for the entire school year each of the last three harvests, from a total of around $15,000 raised by ETHS over five years. This is not a huge amount of money for American schools to fund-raise, but it literally has changed and saved lives on the ground in the Kasungu schools!
What's more, visitors from other communities and schools have come to learn how Andrews Nchessie and his team have made this happen, and we now find 20 more schools (as of April 2022) who want to partner and implement this same model in order to become food self-sufficient into their futures. It is a simple model and solution to a horrible problem of poverty and starvation.
A crop like this allows kids to be well-fed, healthier, happier, feeling safer, and able to learn better without disruptions!! This is what it is all about!!
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