Ngara, TZ – Students begin reaping harvests from banana trees, improving school breakfast – 15 Jan 2019

After a year of properly maintaining their banana trees, students at Kabalenzi and Mukirehe Primary Schools are harvesting and serving bananas in their school breakfasts. The bananas provide carbohydrates, vitamins, and other nutrients. Students tend the banana farms and the trees are self-fertilizing. Thus, the bananas are a critical part of making the schools food self-reliant.

After seeing the success of the banana farm at Mukibogoye Primary Schoool, SODAT collaborated with Mukirehe and Kabalenzi to plant and maintain banana trees for the breakfast feeding programs. The bananas reduce each schools’ need for corn, which reduces the size of the area they must farm to provide corn for all students. In Ngara, bananas are a cultural staple and the students much prefer them to corn flour.

SODAT’s 2019 goal is for each school is to serve bananas for 57 days out of the 192 day school year. They hope to increase this number gradually over the next few years as the trees mature and the farms grow.

Each school’s dream is to be able to harvest more and more bananas as are they are delicious with cooked beans and vegetables and are very filling.