Eliud Omutanyi from Kenya joined WCS´s core team recently. We are very impressed by his accomplishments. A true Climate Leader. We are proud to show you his work:
Meet Eliud and his Vision Farmers project
In his own words: Train a child, impact the whole community!
What we are doing and intend to do
Our journey started in 2010, and it began quite simply by the realisation that resilience goes hand in-hand with self-sufficiency, self-reliance and environmental sustainability. These emerged for our community as the necessary tools to ensure food, as well as environmental security and we set out then to gather the necessary information to build ourselves a full toolkit.
Putting food on the table every evening has been my greatest pride since then. Though there’s still a long way to go, the ball is already rolling.
We came together as a community and created a community-based organization called Vision Farmers’ Organization. I was given the opportunity to chair and steer the organization towards realizing resilience, restoration farming community sustainability. I began doing research and gathering what knowledge and information I could find, from books, magazines and other sources of agricultural information and passing the same to the community through the organization. That was when we began to understand how years of following what were described as ‘modern’ agricultural methods, using fertilisers to feed crops. had in fact depleted our soils, leaving vulnerable to erosion.
The practice of selecting the best seed for food had also left those of lowest quality for planting, but we did not fully appreciate how important the quality of seed is to producing good crops.
That was when we began to realise that we had to find sources of learning about better techniques to help ourselves to learning from the past, and began to build our skills towards more sustainable community farming, and found out about permaculture methods.
We began with composting, to re-build soil fertility, and set to weeding the fields that had been planted, to reduce competition for our crops. We selected the best seed from that year’s crop and started preparing fields for planting.
So, we mobilised our best troops: our children!
On my birthday I invited others from all over the world to join me in seeing that more trees are planted, more food is grown and, in short, an agroforestry project is launched to marry the needs of our ecosystem with those of our people.
This is what I call the balancing act and healing of mother earth.
To realize this, I put my teaching skills in action owing to my professional teacher training. Working with children has been so fulfilling as I train them on taking care of the planet. My first priority has been training these children in planting trees and taking a good care of them.
As we strive towards realizing an increased tree cover, challenges are also immense. We have been facing water insufficiency for a long time now. It is towards this end that we don’t tire in our endeavour to plants trees, which we believe that will be a lasting solution to the existing water crisis emanating from climate change.
In so doing, I keep engaging and nurturing children to take up tree planting and environmental conservation as whole. These children are living in a water crisis and I keep telling them that we are in this situation because most of those people who came before us chose to cut down trees therefore losing our water catchment areas. This loss of trees has resulted in the current water crisis.
We believe that bringing up a climate change aware generation will result in effective reversal of the effects of climate change.
We train children and youth, whom we see as agents of long-term change. True to our word, the impact of involving these age groups has been immense. Children are also encouraging their parents to plant trees and take care of their environment, we believe, calls for more involvement and teaching.
Imagine a generation of a people who care so much about the planet and have lived through a climate crisis like what we have now. This will result in a generation that will see a greener planet.
Please visit the organisation VISION FARMERS´ ORGANISATION to learn more about his project.
The intro text says:
This website is about one crucial question:
What future do we want for our children?
The answer is in our hands!