Fifty-year-old Lydia Wangui Ndungu’s face lights up when she talks about farming. She’s so excited, you’d think she’s talking about growing money. It has changed her life.
“First I planted green vegetables,” she says. “And I sold them and made 1 000 [Kenyan] shillings.”
That success whet Ndungu’s appetite for farming — and making money — and she has kept growing from strength to strength ever since.
With free time now that her children have grown up, Ndungu planted tomatoes, green vegetables and melons to sell.
“When my husband came home and saw that I want to work, he supported me. Many times he gave me the money to get casual labourers to help me,” she says.
Ndungu’s husband lives and runs a taxi business in Nairobi, and used to be the only breadwinner in the household.
Around the same time, Ndungu heard about a group called Ndikwe Mwirhti, which was borrowing money from Juhudi Kilimo, a microfinance institution for farmers.
“So when I joined Juhudi Kilimo, I became a money woman because I have a cow, I have a goat, I have a motorbike. And I have a big, good stone house,” she smiled, happily talking in English which she rarely uses.
Ndungu, who now is on her third loan, started by borrowing 50 000 shillings in 2009. “I bought a cow,” she says. She paid the loan off with the proceeds from selling milk from the cow.
Then she borrowed 75 000 to buy water pipes to water her fields from a nearby waterfall. Things were going well, and she started constructing a new house with her farming proceeds.
That’s when the challenges started, although they seem to pale in comparison to the overall success when Ndungu tells her story. “The other farmers told me, ‘You can’t pass your water pipes through our fields.’ They were jealous,” she says.
However, Ndungu persevered, managed to pay off her loan, and got another one. This time she bought thinner piping to go with a water pump that would irrigate her fields from a nearby river. She also got a motorbike to transport her milk to the market.
“When they saw that I was succeeding anyway, they started pretending we are friends. And now they buy my vegetables,” she says.
It’s not only Ndungu who has succeeded in her lending group, which consists of 33 members. “Everyone has paid their loans back,” says Ndungu. “When we started to get loans, there were many people without cows,” she says. “We were very poor.”
“Many now have cows and many have goats, and even have money to educate their children,” she adds. “I see a difference because even some children started standard eight. Before the children didn’t use to go to secondary school.”
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