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The vegetable gardens of the Sahel
School vegetable gardens
Our partner sent us a request for a project to build a school canteen. Indeed, children generally have to walk several kilometers to go to school. They cannot go home at noon and have nothing to eat.
However, building a canteen requires money for construction but also money for maintenance, for staff and for food. By accepting this project, we would have accepted that these populations remain dependent on our association and obliges us to have a budget devoted entirely to this canteen every year. However, we advocate the appropriation of projects as well as the empowerment of these populations.
ENS has therefore thought of a way to meet this demand because it is a real problem. We finally thought of setting up a system of school vegetable gardens. This allows:
to respond to the initial problem by making up for the children's lack of food;
to provide teaching tools to teachers who often lack resources.
The teachers having an interest in the preservation of these vegetable gardens, they take care and maintain them. In addition, during school holidays it is the women's groups and the Pathfinders who take over. There too, they benefit from it because it is often the mothers, brothers and sisters of the children who go to school.
