“Looking back and seeing the interesting journey we’ve had, the success we see today; nourished families, markets thriving, young people and children learning the wisdom of the earth, then we know that, organic farming isn’t just farming, it’s the future we all need to grow together.’’
My name is Esther Wangari Kiruthi, and I’ve been working to promote agroecological organic practices among smallholders since 2010. As the Founder and Director of Community Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Environmental Program (CSHEP), I envision to enlighten the smallholder farmers, women and the youth to make decisions and act based on pure understanding of the holistic environment approaches.
Creating awareness
The main goal of our CSHEP program is to encourage farmers to adopt organic farming practices in their gardens, boosting production and income while promoting food security, nutrition, and environmental sustainability. The first step toward this goal is raising awareness within local communities. That’s why we work closely with women, youth, school children, and the broader community in Kajiado, Nairobi, and Kiambu Counties, guiding them toward safe food production and environmental conservation practices.
©CSHEP.
Conserving schools and communities
To promote agroecological agriculture as a means to protect the environment, we have introduced and trained kitchen gardening and trees growing to young ones in schools. Through our continuous outreach efforts, we managed to help more than 20 schools to establish kitchen gardens and to plant trees, embracing organic farming. We also supported environmental conservation in the community and schools through trees growing that led to recognition by the Kiambu county government for an award for the Environmentalist of the year 2023.
©CSHEP.
Enhancing food and financial security
Knowing how market access and financial security concern especially smallholder farmers, we provide active support for establishing farmers’ markets to provide direct market outlets for the organic produce of our farmers and safe access to organic food for our customers. Meanwhile, the CSHEP itself also creates employment opportunities, directly through recruitment of program staff, and indirectly through people engaged by farmers in their farms and gardens.
Combating challenges ahead
Our journey over the last one and half decades hasn’t been always smooth. We’ve encountered challenges at different levels, from the Inability to reach target communities due to inadequate motorised means of transport, to inadequate water or extreme weather conditions, to the lack of adequate funding. But whenever we look back and see how far we’ve come from where we were, we know that we’re growing together with our communities, towards a future that we envision to co-create.
