Help Bountiful Gardeners Boost Food Security in Kenya

I am helping raise funds for Wamalwa Murefu and Margaret Silali, founders of Bountiful Gardeners for Africa. They are based in Trans-Nzoia county of Kenya where they teach families and communities how to grow more food with less land, resources and fertilizers that are often too expensive for family farmers. They use organic biointensive farming and are doing research to process and safely utilize human derived fertilizers in agricutlure to boost soil health and crop productivitity, as well as community sanitation, food security and health, sustainably.

They are seeking US$15,000 for this year to train 1,000 families and their communities in Kenya. This cost works out to about US$2 per person trained and able to grow more food, using just the seeds, tools and other resources these communities already have. Grow Biointensive is a remarkable, human-based food production system that focuses on growing not only more food with less land and resources, but also nutritionally complete diets as well as producing enough compost to maintian and improve soil organic matter which is essential for soil health. To learn more about Grow Biointensive, see www.growbiointensive.org.

These funds will also allow them to continue their work on closing the nutrient cycle by recycling human waste safely back to agricultural land. There has been lots of research and publications showing the benefits safely processed human waste can have on crop productivity, but none showing how a complete, closed loop nutrient cycling food production system could work! These funds will help covers the costs of building dry toilets, thermometers, personal protective equipment, travel and labor to train and collect data. They have built 4 urine-diverting dry toilets so far and have developed a system using these toilets and secondary composting to achieve pathogen-killing temperatures and times (55C for 14 consecutive days or 60C for 7 consecutive days) but more testing is needed in more areas to confirm this system and the composting recipe consistently achieves these pathogen-killing temperatures and times, both before and after compost turning. They can then determine how the additions of human derived fertilizers can help minimize the land needed to grow nutritionally complete diets for a community as well as enough compost materials for the soil.

Thank you so much for your interest and your support! They would be very appreciative of anything you can donate to their work helping build food security, food sovereignty and community health in Kenya.