“Before, we had enough rain and good harvests here”, remembers Lucy Wanjiru, a sixty year old farmer from Kigio in central Kenya. “I could sell the surplus at our local market or even in Thika, the city nearby. It was enough to live on and to send our three children to school.”
Then her husband died of liver cancer. That was in 1982. From then on her life became steadily harder. She had to take her children out of school because she could no longer afford the fees. She also had repeatedly bad harvests as the rains became increasingly unpredictable. “In extreme years the yields were so bad that the state gave out food aid to the elderly and orphans.” Mrs Wanjiru was not considered for aid and so instead of three meals a day, her family ate only in the evening. “The children cried. They were hunger and had stomach ache and they lost weight”, she says bitterly.
Today her daughter and two sons are grown up and married. But in 2004 one of her daughters in law contracted meningitis and left six children behind. Lucy brought the children to her, since her son seeks his income as a casual labourer and is away most of the time. Since then she has done everything for her grandchildren. But she is worried about the future. “I am getting older and my strength is failing” she confesses. “I don’t know how I am going to manage.” But Mrs Wanjiru has no choice and seizes her fate. Since 2010 she has attended courses in sustainable farming. In these practice-oriented trainings, financed by Biovision and supervised by the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), she learns how to make compost and how to combat maize pests organically. Lucy Wanjiru is very interested in organic farming – not least because artificial fertiliser and agrochemicals are unaffordable for her now. In addition, she has experienced that sufficient harvests are possible even with a lack of rain, if the soil has been ploughed deeply enough and enriched with compost. Mrs Wanjiru is satisfied with the project: “It is very helpful”, she says. “I was able to increase the maize yield and milk production considerably. With this, my six grandchildren and I will get by”.