How do you know if your chosen fabulous looking charity is providing good value for your money? Charities frequently report percentages of money spent on “Programs”, “Administration” and “Fundraising” or some similar ensemble. While I understand the motivation for this approach, I think it is the wrong way to go about finding out if your
What’s better than one oil palm nursery growing 60,000 high yielding seedlings for the smallholders of Kigoma? How about five oil palm nurseries growing 60,000 high yielding seedlings for the smallholders of Kigoma? Did someone say ten nurseries?! Well, maybe not yet, but we’ve recently made the first few steps in that direction. With the support of our
Often on this blog we write about general development issues and how they play out in our local Seed Change context. Not today. It’s straight local context and no wider issues. A Seed Change progress report. An update even. Those of you playing along at home may remember that three months ago we planted 60,000+
Today’s blog post comes from Jackson Ruvamuwabo, our Community Development Manager. Jackson teaches our farmer training classes, conducts one-on-one farmer visits, and builds relations with local village government. Seed Change works with over 400 smallholder palm oil farmers in the Kigoma region; one of them is John Ibrahim from Kizenga village. Before joining Seed Change,
Patrick Sirrs, an irrigation professional and Seed Change supporter, has been providing irrigation advice and support to us for over a year – but always from the comfort of his home in Canada. In February he decided to come to out to Kigoma, see what we were doing on the ground, break a bit of
24,000 trees. That’s how many we have in our nursery to give out to farmers. Sounds like a lot. And it is when you have to shovel the 400 tons of soil needed to grow the seeds. But it is not really many trees when you start thinking about which farmers – exactly – they
What do you get if you combine 3.5 hectares of land, 31,000 poly bags, turned inside out and with holes poked into them, 3,400kg of DAP fertilizer, 400 tons of soil – sifted to remove stones, roots, and assorted foreign bodies, 2,951m of PVC pipes, 176 sprinklers, 4 water tanks, 3 water pumps, a whole
We’ve moved our nursery! Seed Change’s nursery is now located on the grounds of the Luiche Secondary School in Kamara Village. We are very lucky to be using this land as the Luiche School is centrally located to our program villages and is only 15 mins from Kigoma town (our previous nursery site was a
Guest blog post by Andrew Benn After more than a year supporting Seed Change from the comfort of Perth, I was lucky enough to spend December in Kigoma getting my hands dirty. I managed to squeeze in a day of looking at lions in the Serengeti before jumping on the bus to Kigoma in the
After months of planning, building, researching, and a good bit of hoping, today we planted our first hybrid seeds in our newly constructed greenhouse. All the way from Costa Rica, the seeds enjoyed planes journeys from San Jose through Panama, Amsterdam, and Nairobi, to Bujumbura in Burundi. From there, a car ride to Kigoma followed, before overnighting (in my lounge room) in town before we chauffeured them to the...