Promoting food education, child engagement, figting malnutrition and illegal poaching through green-houses and tuition programs.

• Schedule: Jan 1 to Aug 11th, 2011
• Location: Mtito-Andei, Kenya

• Project Director: Rick Montgomery
• Project Manager (remote): Patrick Firouzian
• Project Manager (Kenya): James Odaba

• Photos of the mission on Flickr
• Videos of the mission on Youtube

• Learn more about Global Roots in Kenya here
• Learn more about Matangini here

• For more information: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
• Learn about Global Roots Service Corps

• See the blog entries for this project here

The Challenge for children in Mtito-Andei

• HIV and prostitution are rampant, over 5% are HIV positive
• Children have access to HIV medication, but not to adequate and nutritious food (<2 meals per day)
• Negative factors - Poaching, Human-wildlife conflicts, Deforestation  
• Too many children without adequate parental care leads to abuse

Facts

• HIV positive children need adequate food to manage strong medication
• Children cannot learn effectively on an empty stomach
• Water is scarce, difficult to obtain and use for daily living and crops 
• Many children lacking parents suffer from trauma, with very few options for positive social development or hope for a productive, viable future 

Food shortages

• Purchasing food for a regular meal, per child per day: 180 shillings ($2.2)
• For a sick child, per child per day: 250 shillings ($3.2). That is roughly $1,200 / yr, given a sick child needs daily special nutritional support
• In Matulani School today there are 10 sick children, in the Mtito-Andei division there are 140 sick children. With $25K, we could feed these 150 children for 50 days…. however.....

Facts

• We cannot feed every single HIV positive child with the resources we have available nor is external purchasing sustainable over time.
• We seek to put in place long term food production capacity to reduce the daily costs of a balanced meal from $3.2 to $1
• There is an opportunity for both improving educational outcomes and sustainable solutions for nutrition for both the sick and healthy children of Mtito- Andei

Location

This project is situated on the northern edge of Tsavo National Park, the area marked as "Matulani community" on this map.

The Matangini primary school

This small school helps 300 local children acquire basic literacy skills. Age ranges from 6 to 15. All of the children come from neighboring villages and travel between 1 to 10 kilometers daily to attend school.

Global Roots has been supporting the school regularly since 2008. In a recent mission, we discovered a key challenge for many of the students. They lack proper nutrition which compromises their attention and retention in class. The chronically sick students are at additional risk of falling further behind in school, or tragically, succumbing through malnutrition hastened by the very medications that could save them with an adequate healthy diet .

Our green house solution

This low-water use technology ia an elegant, cost-effective solution:

• it allows the most output per liter of water by square meter
• they are simple to operate and maintain
• they are relatively inexpensive and available locally for purchase 

Vegetables can be grown efficiently include: kale, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, sweet pepper, broccoli, runner beans, french beans, okra, snow peas, zucchini, carrots, leeks, okra, chilies, celery, ginger, garlic, coriander and other herbs.

The Approach: Food, Education and Shelter

Adequate healthy food is scarce in this area. Few children get two meals per day. According to their teachers, the children cannot study for an entire day and are exhausted by afternoon.

Children without the care of their parents, often living in foster families, generally are given the lowest priority for food and education in many fostering situations. Sadly, it is not uncommon to hear of orphaned children being required to stay in the village or farm to take care of the animals while the foster parent's natural children go to school with a full stomach.

Children suffering from diseases (such as HIV, around 5% in the Matangini school) are at considerable risk for adverse outcomes. We have witnessed deaths, year after year, of children due to malnutrition during treatment.

Stigmatization and abuse of orphans creates long-term trauma in vulnerable children already suffering significant stress and loss.

Our approach is simple: To empower and inspire children to take an active role in the food production process as creators, teaching them long-term skills including teamwork, leaderhip and positive social development, ensuring their health and well-being in school and treament, and giving them hope, ecological awareness and healing to alleviate their trauma.

Schedule

• Project kickoff - Jan 2011
• Research and vendor selection – Feb-March
• First greenhouse installation complete – May 15th
• First crops – July 2011
• Evaluation and program scale – August 2011

Please reach us This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for details.

See the blog entries for this project here