Ngara, TZ – Garden shop and school continuously improving breakfast gardening – 22 Mar 2017

SODAT’s garden shop team continues to collaborate with school leaders to continuously improve the schools grow-your-own breakfast program. The most recent improvement involved collaborating with district education officers, the headmaster, and teachers at Mukibogoye to rearrange students’ responsibilities and increase focus on the breakfast program.

Originally, SODAT worked with teachers to organize interested students from classes four, five, and six. Students from these classes were arranged into groups of five and each group had specific responsibilities in the gardens. However, these responsibilities often conflicted with the students’ other school responsibilities.

Other school responsibilities like sweeping, landscaping, and cleaning classrooms and toilets, are assigned by grade level. This meant that students in the garden clubs were not excused from their other responsibilities. Teachers could not keep track of which students were in garden clubs so these students often found themselves asked to perform double duty in the brief time allotted each day for non-academic work.

Garden shop manager David Gitanga worked with the district education officer and school administration to agree that class six’s sole responsibility would be working in the gardens. This would ensure all school garden club members could focus on their gardens and it simplified scheduling and organizing students for teachers.

David reports that since making the change the teachers have been much more supportive, making sure students report to gardens on time each day, and students have been happy to have this single responsibility to focus on.

Now, everyone is working hard to make sure Mukibogoye continues harvesting 90 kg of vegetables per week so they can qualify to continue growing their organic vegetable gardens.