Education is key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals, including those that focus on food security, sustainable food production, and poverty reduction. It is also an important part of UN Environment’s work.
Around 8 million households in South Africa struggle to put food on the table. Hunger and chronic malnutrition are widespread in such families, many of which rely on small-scale farming to survive. Saving rainwater and storing it safely can help them have a healthy diet.
The Amanzi for Food project aims to help farmers make the most of every drop of rain that falls. It seeks to get smallholder farmers to adopt tried and tested methods of rainwater capture and storage. It also engages colleges and extension workers to help spread the word to smallholders.
The project is supporting South Africa’s National Development Plan, which seeks to increase the number of households with adequate food supplies by 200,000, and to establish support to 80,000 smallholder producers.
UN Environment supports the Global Universities Partnership on Environment and Sustainability network, and Amanzi project implementers are members of the network. UN Environment’s role is, therefore, promoting Amanzi’s approach and sharing it with other network members so that it can be rolled out more widely.
A key group to target to implement the government’s Plan is women. This is because women are usually the ones who make the decisions about food production in smallholder farmer households. The project also targets extension officers and local development officers as they are key to getting people to change how they farm and collect rainwater.
The project is also encouraging colleges in South Africa to switch their focus to the smallholder sector. Initial project analysis showed that colleges continue to concentrate on larger-scale farming and mainstream irrigation technologies, even though water is increasingly scarce. The agricultural sector is the largest water user in South Africa. There is little “new” water for smallholder farmers to use.
Under the project, agricultural colleges and universities, working in partnership, play a major role by designing curricula, and training those who later go on to train others, thus spreading knowledge about the importance of rainwater collection.
The Amanzi project was developed as a social learning innovation partnership between the Water Research Commission and Rhodes University’s Environmental Learning Research Centre, and local partners. It has been running for 18 months.
The project helps agricultural college lecturers develop curriculum innovations such as setting up shared demonstration sites. It also includes extension officers, local economic development officers, researchers, farmers and farmers’ association members in its training of trainers’ sessions.
The hope is that the training model can be copied and benefit people all over Africa.
“Rainwater harvesting is critical to agricultural production across Africa but telling people what to do will never be enough. Rather, we must empower people through education,” says Jaime Webbe, an education specialist in UN Environment.
“That is why we highlight projects such as Amanzi that provide farmers, especially women, with the knowledge and skills they need to innovate and apply new technologies in their own lives.”
For further information: Jaime Webbe: Jamie.Webbe[at]unep.org
