Description

This gift helps a community access a safe source of water for their village or farming activities. Communities are also empowered with the technical skills to manage and maintain the water source.

How your gift helps

Imagine having to cart water in wheelbarrows and plastic buckets up to five kilometres, just to water the vegies which you rely on for income and food…That was the daily reality for a determined group of women after they started a shared garden near their village in Zimbabwe. There had to be a better way to irrigate their vegies - that’s where TEAR’s local partner Health Education and Food Security Organisation (HEFO) came in.

Your gift enables TEAR partners like HEFO to be the helping hand for people battling tough economic and environmental conditions that keep them in poverty. In the Nkayi district of rural Zimbabwe, successive years of storms, rainfall failure and pests have led to very low crop yields. The country’s struggles with inflation and other economic problems have also combined to leave many people with little food to live on.

Fortunately for the women of the Njombolo village garden and others, HEFO has been working on food security and improving agricultural livelihoods for many years. Small landholders have been trained in sustainable crop growing practices and others have received goats, cattle and chickens, along with livestock training. Some of this training has been done in local church buildings and churches have been supportive of the community’s effort to develop self-sustaining farming enterprises.

In addition, HEFO helps to establish ‘livelihood gardens’, like the one at Njombolo village where around 42 women developed a plot of land to grow vegetables as a cash crop. HEFO’s resources go toward fencing, plastic buckets and most importantly the drilling of boreholes. Not only are the vegies flourishing with a source of reliable close-at-hand water - 80 households and their livestock are benefiting too.

No wonder there’s smiles all round now and plenty of willing hands to work the new borehole pump! The persistence of these amazing women is underscored by their collective ethic, explained this way by one of the group’s leaders: “anything good that is coming from this garden is first because we are together and are working in unity.”