New food security and nutrition USDA contract with Partners for Development.

Based on GSC-Tanzania’s seven years of promoting food security in northern Tanzania through bio-intensive agriculture, and successful pilots of the Newcastle Disease Control project of its NGO partners, GSC-Tanzania and its partners propose expanding the promotion of organic gardening and improved rural poultry systems into a regional program bringing food security to over 2,000 smallholder farmers on both a subsistence and commercial basis.

This program uses proven methods to empower rural producer groups by increasing the use of sustainable agriculture and kitchen gardens. In select communities this will also involve organizing village-level collection/buying/ selling points, ensuring quality produce through a participatory guarantee system of certification, encouraging rural poultry markets, conducting practical research and sharing knowledge on food preservation and appropriate irrigation skills with participant farm families. The program also will target families caring for Persons Living with HIV/AIDS.

Market linkages ensure that profitable and equitable relationships will benefit rural producers, small and medium entrepreneurs and others along the value-added chain.

Visit our website at http://www.globalservicecorps.org to find out more information about our programs in Tanzania!

A Global Service Corps Sustainable Agriculture Success Story

  Editors note: The Kitomaris are a Tanzanian family who learned about bio-intensive agriculture through training provided by Global Service Corps sustainable agriculture program.

The Kitomaris have six children, which they will struggle to put through school. In recent years the imperative of intensification has increased as farm sizes have become smaller through passing parcels to children. Few families live in traditional houses, and family sizes are getting smaller. This imperative has caused the Kitomaris to become fully converted to bio-intensive agriculture. Behind the Kitomari farmstead is a garden with eight large compost piles 2×1 meters square. Here, the Kitomaris share the secret of their success, and the reason they get so many visitors. In 2002, with the help of Global Service Corps volunteers, they learned to make compost and how to utilize it in ‘deep dug beds.

“We were so amazed to see what a difference the compost and deep-dug vegetable beds made in our farm. We stopped using chemicals. We soon had too many vegetables and our neighbors began to come to buy from us in the dry season when they had no gardens. This was the start of a small revolution on our farm.”

Soon their farm had drawn the interest of visitors from Heifer International, and the Kitomaris became farmer motivators in fish and goats. The latter helped them to increase their compost-making to much more than they needed on their small farm, so they began to sell it!  How strange that anyone would make a business of selling compost, but at Tsh 20,000 per pile it has proven to be a good income generator.

The Nambala neighborhood now knows that they can get advice if they want to dig their own deep-dug vegetable beds. While at first, it seems like a lot of hard work Mr. Kitomari says, “once the beds are established, they last for three years without re-plowing, and they don’t stop producing. We follow one crop with another and they use so little water compared to our old system.”

Using the techniques taught by Global Service Corps, the Kitomaris have seven beds which produce abundant green vegetables for their meals, and they sell green, organic vegetables to their neighbors all through the year!

 Photo: Mr. Kitomari on his families farm

Summer in Tanzania

Editors Note: M. DeAgostino visited Tanzania from May 29 to August 1, 2008. This is a piece she wrote about the time she spent volunteering with Global Service Corps in the HIV/AIDS Education and Prevention Program.

This summer I traveled to Arusha, Tanzania, to intern with an international NGO, Global Service Corps (the internship was sponsored by the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame). I spent weekdays teaching secondary school students and community groups about HIV/AIDS and life-skills and conducting research in medical anthropology for my senior thesis, which I will complete this academic year.

I was placed in a homestay with a local Tanzanian family, so I had the opportunity to eat traditional cuisine, improve my Kiswahili, and ride dala dalas, the public transportation, every day. The dala dalas are crazy vans created to hold 15 people typically crammed with 25 or more.

On weekends, I was able to make small trips outside of Arusha. I went on safari to some of Tanzania’s beautiful national parks, including Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater, and the Serengeti. The parks were breathtaking, both for their landscapes and the incredible wildlife.

Not only are the varied species amazing, but the density of animals is astounding!

I also had the privilege of visiting a Maasai village outside of Arusha. A Maasai warrior who works for Global Service Corps invited some volunteers to spend a weekend in his traditional village, where we witnessed and attempted to participate in (at their insistence) spectacular jumping dances; in the morning, they slaughtered a goat for breakfast, and they shared its blood with us!

My time in Tanzania was amazing, and I definitely plan to go back ideally as a physician after medical school.

American politics in Tanzania

Editor’s note: This picture was taken by Jennifer R. who is currently an intern in Global Service Corps HIV/AIDS education and prevention program. Thanks for the photo Jennifer.

Everyone seems to be involved in American politics during this election year. Even in Arusha, Tanzania the local Daladala (mini bus taxi) drivers are getting their opinions heard. Daladala’s are usually decorated in some form by their drivers, but this may be the first time a US presidential candidate has been featured on one’s rear window!