Mt Kilimanjaro, TZ – Long-time gardener continues improving life for his family – 19 Aug 2016

After 3 years of maintaining a productive vegetable garden, the father of the MGA family is finally seeing his biggest dream come true: his family now has affordable water piped directly to their home. This improvement will reduce their water bill by as much as 10,000 TZS (USD $5.00) per week, provide a new source of income selling water to neighbors, and enable the family to increase the size of their vegetable garden.

Mr. MGA and his wife support nine children and grandchildren at their home. The MGA family was one of the first two families to start an organic vegetable garden with Lishe Bora in 2013. The family’s garden has always been a best-practice example. However, during the dry season they had to pay up to 2,000 TZS (USD $1.00) per day for water. The closest water source was 200 meters away. Mr. MGA has poor lungs so he could not carry all of the water necessary for the garden. The children and grandchildren who live with him are too small to carry more than a few buckets in a day, so during the dry season he would have to pay someone to carry water from the stream. The costs became so high that Mr. MGA decided to reduce his garden from twelve beds to five beds.

On Wednesday, August 10, community members in Mkyashi celebrated the completion of a community water distribution system. The MGA family now has a tap at home where they will pay between 10-25 TZS per 20L bucket of water, instead of 200 TZS per 20L bucket.

Now that they have affordable water, the family is looking forward to increasing the size of their vegetable garden to 12 beds again. They may increase the size of the garden even more if they continue to have a ready market of buyers.