LEARN2: Food Security In South Africa

Food Security In South Africa and how Abalimi is helping.

About 46% of South African households are considered poor or low-income, more then 15 million poor people living in rural areas in South Africa and over 60% of black households can be
defined as low-income and rely mostly on the informal sector for an income. It is estimated that 60% of South Africa’s people live below, what the United
Nations describes, the poverty line.

A recent analysis indicated that more than 80% of South Africa’s adult population has been denied access by the formal banking sector and conventional credit facilities. It is therefore
difficult for poor people to get out of the poverty trap.

We as the Northern Cape Provincial Department of Agriculture and Land Reform has a duty and a responsibility to make a meaningful contribution, together with our colleagues in the public
sector and in partnership with the private sector and civil society, to help people use the natural resources profitable and in a sustainable way in order to protect the resources for future use by our children.

Abalimi is the organization that is forming the right future.

Abalimi means: "the Planters" in Xhosa, the predominant language among their target community. We assist individuals, groups and community based organisations to initiate and maintain permanent organic food growing and nature conservation projects as the basis for sustainable lifestyles, self-help job creation, poverty alleviation and environmental renewal.



Abalimi provides training and low-cost, subsidised gardening resources like manure, seeds, tools, and organic pest control at its two gardens in Nyanga and Khayelitsha townships, which are staffed by fieldworkers from those communities.



Every year around 3,000 micro-farmers make use of the gardens, but the benefits spill over into the wider target of roughly one million people who live in the vast informal sprawl on the outskirts of metropolitan Cape Town, where unemployment is around 40 percent. 


Growing self-sufficiency



Abalimi helps its farmers develop their own organic vegetable gardens to supplement their diet, improve household food and nutritional security, and provide
sustainable additional income. The personal satisfaction, community building,
and heightened self-esteem that come from growing food are added
benefits.



"We didn't know a lot of things like spinach, which is a healthy thing; we didn't even know the green pepper! Now I eat green beans, and the children, they also like all these vegetables," said Phillipina, who helps care for at least a dozen grandchildren.



"If this garden had been here before, I wouldn't have gone to work outside as a domestic worker. As a domestic worker, you're working for the money to pay for the vegetables. But in the garden, you grow your own veggies to eat or sell. You own it," said Shaba Esitang, 78. Abalimi's work can be best described by looking at our target group, core business and target areas.

Their Target Group are living in vast informal settlements, often referred to as townships to the North-East of Cape Town, where up to one million people now live, mostly in shacks and matchbox houses. Approximately 40% of its people are unemployed. The majority speak Xhosa and are recent arrivals from the Eastern Cape - the former apartheid homelands of Transkei and Ciskei.

Their Core Business is to assist their Target Group to, firstly, combat poverty by growing food sustainably, using organic methods, at home and in community gardens and, secondly, to plant water wise indigenous trees and flora in schools and streets, in order to transform the dune-sands of the Cape Flats into a sustainable water-wise urban environment.

Their Target Area is the Cape Flats - including Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Phillipi-Browns Farm, Crossroads and Gugulethu. The Cape Flats are ecologically sensitive dune sand areas which contain some of the most threatened floral species within the unique Cape Floral Kingdom, a World Heritage Biome. Thus we strive through all our activities and projects to conserve what is left and to renew what has been destroyed.

Abalimi is a brilliant initiative and is creating food security in my community(Cape Town) I am going on their tour on tuesday and will post a video blog about my amazing excursion.