Why does Kaloko Trust work in Agricultural
Training & Development?
Poor soils, erratic rainfall, and lack of access to credit, seeds or fertilisers, means that rural families are often unable to grow enough food for the year: hunger and food shortages occur for 2 or 3 months every year. Food security is further undermined by loss of labour through diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.

What are we doing?
For some years the Kaloko Trust has operated a Household Food Security Programme. The initial scheme provided loans of seeds and fertilisers to farmers in the Luansobe area from a revolving fund. Each farmer was supported by extension and training to improve their knowledge and skills - these are particularly necessary to new farmers who have moved out from the urban areas because of chronic unemployment. After the harvest, where farmers could afford to repay the loans, the repayments were used to provide further loans and thus expand the circle of people in the community that cauld be helped.

However, the food security programme has been revised in the light of our experience of running this programme. The current agricultural training programme still focuses on food security, but delivered through a project to spread the expertise and confidence of the community in growing soya.

New food security (soya) project
Research showed that many small-scale farmers find it difficult to grow enough maize to feed their families. The rainfall is erratic and the soils poor, with rapidly declining fertility. Without the resurces to buy fertiliser and with few livestock to provide manure, yields are low which has severely impacted household food supply. Farmers desperately need to find an alternative crop to maize which might both earn them a reasonable income (so they can buy in food) and also improve soil fertility, so that they can continue to grow other crops in a healthy rotation.

Soya-bean cultivation offers such an opportunity. There is a strong commercial market in the area and the income from soya-beans would be significantly higher than that earned from maize. Soya-beans are also leguminous plants and fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil thus improving fertility. At present a few local farmers in the Luansobe area do grow soya-beans but community discussions have found that most people will not cultivate the crop because they neither have the technical knowledge nor the confidence that it would do well in their own farming system.

This project seeks to address this through an extension programme offering practical hands-on training. The first phase of the programme targets 22 leader-farmers selected from 11 villages. The second phase will see those farmers successfully attending the initial course demonstrating how to grow soya-beans to their neighbours on their own farms.

This will spread the experience to a further 150 farming families in the second year. With at least 172 farmers trained in soya-bean production and many of them planting the crop in their fields there should then be sufficient numbers of examples spread locally to allow other farmers to gain exposure to the crop and to be able to make the choice as to its appropriateness to their farming system.

To find out more about the project please see our Food Security (Soya) proposal.