From dependence on relief, village turns into a breadbasket

A decade ago, Katutuni village in Ikombe division within Yatta district was always in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. It was beset by poverty, overwhelmed by preventable diseases while the rate of school dropout due to hunger was high.

Gloom and despair took its toll on residents in the face of unrelenting droughts.

“We had been reduced to nothing. This was no longer a place worth living in,” recalls Raphael Masika.

In the face of such desperation, the community resolved to act. And Makutano Community Development Association (MCDA) was born to be a rallying point for community members to venture into development projects.

Since they had no capacity to turn their dreams into reality, for a while the thoughts remained just that: thoughts.

But by happenstance, Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) in partnership with Safaricom Foundation came to the rescue of the villagers.

“These people knew what they wanted to do. They needed support to realise their dreams,” says Al Kags, KCDF’s head of marketing and partnership.

He says they funded the association and conducted intensive reflection sessions that helped the community acknowledge and appreciate the resources within its locality, define its priorities and device strategies to address them.

To address the problem of hunger, MCDA has trained and worked with the community to harvest rain water for irrigation. The village is slowly being transformed as a number of services are now within a radius of five kilometres.

Today, the community has 10 dams, seven shallow wells and one borehole drilled close to one of the dams. The villagers have turned 10,000 acres land into productive use.

“We have exorcised the evil spirits of dependence on relief food,” says Masika, in Biblical-speak terms.

Through the assistance of the two organisations, MCDA now has a secondary school catering for children from poor backgrounds, 32 of whom are orphans.

The association is also engaged in intensive cultivation of drought-resistant crop varieties, beekeeping and processing sunflower for oil.

All this has been achieved, thanks to KCDF and Safaricom Foundation’s 2007 pilot food security programme that sought to support Kenyans to grow their own food instead of relying on relief supplies.

Encouraged by the results, KCDF sought to augment the programme by incorporating innovative ways of growing food as well as expand it to many areas.

In September 2009, the organisation launched the Ustawi Initiative – a programme that seeks to support communities to grow food crops using modern technologies like greenhouse farming, water harvesting, and drip irrigation, among others.

In all, a total of 10 communities have been brought in, all posting positive results.