Haller has built an innovative Bustani and garden to illustrate 30 practical low cost ways to improve the lives of urban families. We have adapted many of the techniques we have used successfully with smallholder farmers to enable people living in slums to produce food, energy, and harvest clean water; enabling families to grow enough to eat, and to be able to generate some income and take their first step onto the economic ladder.
Nature
Turning lifeless land into a fertile plot protects the soil and helps crops grow.
Community
The practices honed on the demonstration plot transform the health and economy of communities. Family diets are improved from greater variety and learning how to grow more means farmers can sell more. This powers an economy that the whole community can benefit from.
Economy
Showing farmers exactly what they need to replicate on their plots complements the training we give them and is an effective way to make sure that they implement real change to increase yields.
Women
The majority of smallholder farmers are women and this plot is specifically designed for them: the seedbeds are raised so they don’t have to bend to look after their seedlings everyday. This plot doesn’t just help women learn, it also gives them job satisfaction from accomplishing labour intensive work within a short amount of time. This builds confidence.
Taking agro-ecology to the city: the Urban Slum Garden (Bustani): While rural and peri-urban communities are key focuses of Haller’s work, the Haller Foundation has also pioneered work for city communities. One of the innovations piloted at the Farmer Training Centre is the Bustani, or Urban Shamba. The project is designed to show families living in urban slums that they can improve their livelihoods by growing food, harvesting and purifying water and by creating their own energy sources using low cost and environmentally sound techniques. The project addresses urban poverty in slums through an innovative project which shows how to grow food in the tiniest of spaces. Millions of people across Africa have migrated to urban areas in the search of opportunity. This rural migration very often results in the transfer of poverty, malnutrition and hunger from rural to urban areas. In cities, and without access to land and water, they then have to spend as much as 75% of their daily income just trying to buy food for the day. The incessant cycle of trying to earn enough to buy food makes it impossible to get out of the slums and often results in children (particularly girls) being forced to beg and scavenge rather than be in school, leaving them vulnerable to gangs and violence, unwanted pregnancies, HIV and has a detrimental impact on health and income levels for the majority of families.