Home Residents Equipped With Agricultural Skills
About 20 residents of the Daulomani Safe Home in Lautoka are now equipped with backyard agricultural skills that will not only enable them to grow healthy fruits and vegetables but also generate income.
Thursday 17 March 2022 | 14:42
Tel-A-Woman coordinator, Flolyn Simpson (first from left) speaking to the residents of the Daulomani Safe Home in Lautoka. Photo: Nicolette Chambers
About 20 residents of the Daulomani Safe Home in Lautoka are now equipped with backyard agricultural skills that will not only enable them to grow healthy fruits and vegetables but also generate income.
This comes after Tel-A-Woman coordinators, Flolyn Simpson and Jacklyn Ferguson conducted the team’s first training in Lautoka since the COVID-19 pandemic affected the nation in 2020.
The Tel-A-Woman programme which was born out of the logic developed by Bula Agro Enterprises founder, Sant Kumar, was aimed to assist many women and youths through agriculture.
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The programme is funded by The Farmers Organisations for Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific (FO4ACP).
Ms Ferguson said the programme was specifically for women and youths aged between 15 and 35 years because the team gathered that women were the ones who basically ran a home.
“With Tel-A-Woman it started with Sant Kumar and his logic is if you tell a woman, one woman will tell two other women and they will tell other women and so we are aiming to target 100 women over the next three months in the West and we will conduct a program in Suva in April,” said Ms Ferguson.
She said through the programme they have found that men were also interested to also take part.
She said the objective for the Home was to assist the residents to be able to rake in income and teach them on how to do proper composting and soil preparation which could be sold.
“We are teaching them to prepare the most basic things and most households during COVID were given packets of seeds and they didn’t know what to do with the packets of seeds and that is where we came in,” she explained.
“We are teaching them how to choose the perfect seeds and the perfect environment which is sterilizing the soil and to do proper composting, fertilizing management just to ensure that you get one hundred per cent yield from the packet of seeds that you have.”
Daulomani Home coordinator and founder, Edwina Biyau said the programme would benefit the residents greatly.
“Instead of buying expensive items we now realize that there are things around us that we can use for our backyard gardening and even for generating income for the women we have here,” she said.
Feedbacks : nicolette.chambers@fijisun.com.fj
