Susan Chala
Letty Motshwene (52) of Motsephiri in the Northern Province has come a long way from abject poverty to tending a vegetable garden in a school-yard. It took a few months to harvest and take the fresh produce home as a form of food security.
Motshwene was not alone there were 30 women in all, who happened to have children attending the Mamadi High School.
Today Motshwene manages a fully-fledged nursery operated as a cooperative sharing proceeds from sales after committing some funds to replenish stock and the rest to saving.
It was the school’s principal, with permission from the school governing body, who allocated a piece of land within the school’s premises and provided a variety of seedlings to this group to start a vegetable garden. The idea was to alleviate poverty in the surrounding homesteads.
“We were struggling mostly for food so Mrs Mbembe encouraged us to grow a vegetables garden,” said Motshwene.
It took only a year for the project to attract the attention of the authorities. In 1993 the group received a donation a nursery from the provincial Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. A year later fruits began to bear a Green Trust Award for the nursery that carried a R10 000 prize.
True to the spirit of cooperatives, half the prize money was used to buy agricultural books for the school, and the other half to buy kitchen equipment. It is this very kitchen equipment that they used to prepare meals they sold to both teachers and pupils at the school.
In 1998 Motshwene and her collegues were introduced to Africare, a non-profit organisation run by a group of African-Americans that supports development projects in Africa in the areas of environment, food, water and health. Africare donated another nursery to the group, better equipped than the one they have been using since 1993.
In addition, Africare helped them acquire management skills to help them operate the nursery efficiently. “Africare sent us for training at Msinga [KwaZulu-Natal],” said Motshwene.
Training included bookkeeping and advanced modules from Pretoria Technikon.
The group has taken to ploughing their skills back into the community by providing practical training to agriculture pupils at Mamadi High School.
“We didn’t know anything about running a business and would not have been able to pay for training ourselves,’ says Motshwene. “Africare helped us a lot.”
The Washington-based Africare was launched in 1971 and supports more than 150 projects in 28 African nations and has assisted in 35 African countries since inception. “We work closely with village leaders complementing rather than pre-empting local resource and skills,” said Russel Hawkins, director of the Rural Enterprise and Agricultural Development project an agricultural wing of Africare. Rural Enterprise and Agricultural Development’s projects are concentrated in rural areas and work closely with agriculture departments in previously disadvantaged universities.