Gardens for Health International
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Field of Work
environment
If Field of Work is “other” please define in 1-2 words below
Year project started (or projected start date) (yyyy)
2006
YouTube Upload
Project URL (or link to any media coverage)
What is the primary problem your venture is trying to address and how are you addressing it (or planning to address it)?
While antiretroviral therapy is now widely available at low cost in Rwanda, such treatment is largely ineffective in malnourished HIV-positive individuals. Food insecurity and micronutrient deficiency result in both inadequate absorption of the drugs and poor adherence to treatment regimens. Further, HIV-positive farmers are typically ignored by aid efforts and have extremely limited access to land and agricultural inputs
Gardens for Health International (GHI) is US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that aims to provide a sustainable means of nutritional support and economic empowerment to HIV-positive individuals by establishing a network of community agriculture initiatives throughout Rwanda, innovatively targeting malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, and poverty.
GHI's program comprises four integrated components for people living with HIV/AIDS:
1) Legal cooperative formation and land advocacy
2) Provision of inputs for nutritional support gardens and home gardens
3) Training in sustainable agriculture, post-harvest management, and HIV/AIDS specific nutrition education
4) High impact agribusiness opportunities for income generation
GHI invests in the livelihoods of HIV+ Rwandan individuals, working towards a more comprehensive prevention, care and treatment program for HIV/AIDS and a better quality of life for those affected by this devastating disease. Furthermore, GHI empowers Rwandans living with HIV/AIDS to increase their income and access to nutritious food, encouraging self-sufficiency and nutritional independence.
As GHI’s model is easily replicated, the program is scalable. Through our partnership with the Rwandese Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS (RRP+), the coordinating body for the country’s over 1,000 cooperatives and associations of people living with HIV/AIDS, GHI plans to expand the network of community nutrition-through-agriculture programs throughout Rwanda.
Name Your Project
Gardens for Health International
Describe Your Idea
Project Description
GHI aims to provide a sustainable means of nutritional support and economic empowerment to HIV-positive individuals by establishing a network of community agriculture initiatives throughout Rwanda, simultaneously targeting malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, and poverty.
Unique and different
Our venture is unique in that it ties together HIV/AIDS, nutrition, and agriculture -- breaking a cycle of poverty and disease. It does not promote reliance on long term food provisions or packages that foster a cycle of dependency. GHI aims to improve the health and socioeconomic status of people living with HIV/AIDS by equipping them with a different kind of “package”: legal cooperative status, access to arable government land, basic agricultural inputs, training in sustainable agriculture and HIV/AIDS specific nutrition, and income-generating agro-business opportunities. This package is relatively low-cost and is guided by an ethos of autonomy and sustainability.
Project plan
GHI plans to provide inputs (irrigation support, tools, seeds, organic manure) to five additional sites in the Gasabo District and expand the number of cooperative members participating; to increase number and variety of high-nutrient fruit and vegetable seeds (broccoli, spinach, soy beans, green beans, chick peas, orange-flesh sweet potato, squash, pumpkin, swiss chard, beets, avocado trees, moringa trees, mango trees, orange trees, plum trees); to establish 180 home gardens in the Gasabo District; to introduce an agrobusiness pilot project using greenhouse technology for improved tomato production; to hold a week-long nutrition training session; to hold a week-long organic agriculture training session for cooperative leaders and agronomists; to develop a specialized nutritional counseling home visit program for underweight members; and to design a booklet in Kinarywanda with simple, pictorial guides on proper home garden care, cooking techniques to maximize nutritional benefits, specialized recipes, and HIV/AIDS specific nutritional guidelines.
Partnerships
Gardens for Health has successfully formed partnerships with both the Rwandese Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS -- a local civil society organization in Rwanda -- and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative. We have recieved endorsements from the Rwandan National AIDS Commission and the Ministry of Agriculture, and we hope to form long term partnerships with them. Our long term goal is to integrate into Rwanda's national health protocol, and we hope to establish many domestic partnerships across the sectors in which we work--health, environment, nutrition.
Impact
The primary beneficiaries of this project are people living with HIV/AIDS who are members of agricultural cooperatives in Rwanda. We anticipate that their nutrition will improve substantially over time. With improved nutrition, adherence to antiretroviral therapy is expected to improve. Families will also gain new sources of income through small-scale agribusiness opportunities. The GHI program hopes to have significant environmental impact in Africa’s most densely populated country, where 90% of the population relies upon subsistence agriculture by utilizing Bionintensive agriculture techniques to maximize the capacity of small plots of land.
Effectiveness
Approximately 4,000 individuals have become members of new agricultural cooperatives through GHI's facilitation of legal training. Due to budget constraints, we now work with 683 direct beneficiaries, HIV-positive members who receive harvests and training in nutrition and agriculture, and about 2732 indirect beneficiaries--participants’ families.
How do you engage and impact the community?
Several Rwandan staff members orchestrate the programs operations and work directly with the community on the field every day. GHI program staff hold community meetings to discuss how to improve and responds to the needs of the community as best as possible; we are constantly trying to improve our program model. GHI has recently received endorsements from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Rwandan AIDS Control Commission and we hope to scale up our impact on the national level.
How do you measure this impact?
GHI’s monitoring and evaluation protocol is two-fold. First, data for program indicators is collected on an ongoing basis and analyzed at the end of each quarter. At the beginning of each planting season, a baseline report is conducted, describing the initial inputs, number of hectares of land to be cultivated, and number of participants per cooperative and per site. Over the course of each season, we measure crop yields, allocation of crop yields, amount of surplus crops sold, income generated from the sale or surplus crops, consumption of crop yields, dietary diversity changes among cooperative members, and attendance at nutrition and agriculture trainings. Second, GHI conducts bi-annual health, socioeconomic status, and food accessibility surveys.
Obstacles
With a small budget we have not been able to provide the full program to all cooperatives immediately. Additional funding would allow GHI to introduce its program into additional districts throughout Rwanda, where the program has been demanded by PLWHA cooperatives. At the same time, increased funding would allow GHI to provide a larger supply of agricultural inputs (seeds, tools, organic manure) to all cooperatives. GHI would also be able to hold more frequent training sessions. Lastly, GHI would be able to develop an animal husbandry component, improving dairy and protein intake as well as providing a natural source of manure to improve soil fertility.
This Entry is about (Issues)
(or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)
This field has not been completed. (166 words or less)
Aside from financial sustainability, how do you plan to grow and sustain your project?
This field has not been completed. (200 words or less)
Finance details
Approximately $100,000 raised to date.
The primary members of our team are cooperatives of people living with HIV/AIDS. Organizationally speaking, Emma Clippinger and Emily Morell are the Co-Founders and Co-Directors; the GHI Team also includes a Rwanda Country Director, a Project Coordinator, a Nutritionist to provide HIV/AIDS specific nutritional counseling, a Community Garden Agronomist to work on the cooperative nutritional support gardens, and a Biointensive Agriculture Assistant to work on the home garden program.
GHI has established an official partnership with the Rwanda Network for People Living with HIV/AIDS and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative. GHI is in the midst of establishing official partnerships with the Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture, the Rwanda National AIDS Commission, and the Rwanda Agricultural Development Authority.
Creative funding
We have set up a website: www.gardensforhealth.org, which is linked to a PayPal account so that individuals can donate directly online using a secure system. We have also applied for, and won, some business plan competitions. We are currently trying to devise fundraising ideas that will engage donors in advocacy efforts in the global problem of malnutrition especially HIV-positive individuals, the larger movement for sustainable agriculture, and the broader need for agricultural support for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Other non finance needs
1) Technical Expertise in Organic and Biointensive Agriculture; 2) Technical Expertise in Nutritional Monitoring and Evaluation; 3) Non-profit consulting
Motivation
In the summer of 2006, Emily Morell and Emma Clippinger were interns for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) in Rwanda. Morell helped conduct a national pediatric HIV/AIDS care and treatment assessment, while Clippinger worked on the Foundation’s agribusiness initiative. Through discussions with Rwandan healthcare professionals, Morell learned that the very antiretroviral treatment CHAI had helped make available at low cost was undermined by pervasive malnutrition. Malnutrition, she learned, was disrupting drug metabolism and worsening drug side effects, making treatment adherence more difficult. Clippinger recognized that HIV-positive farmers were typically ignored by aid efforts and had extremely limited access to land and agricultural inputs. In discussing the intersection of their work, Clippinger and Morell began to explore the possibility of developing a nutrition-through- agriculture program designed specifically for people living with HIV/AIDS. Gardens for Health International—an organization working to strengthen the underappreciated link between agriculture and health—emerged as a result.
Awards
Youth Venture grant
JP Morgan Good Venture Competition
Brown University Social Entrepreneurship Competition
Clinton Global University Commitment to Action Award
Goldman Sachs Social Entrepreneurship Fund Award
Kathryn Wasserman Davis Foundation Projects for Peace Award
Broader context
Malnutrition, food insecurity , and poverty are critical underlying forces in the AIDS pandemic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where malnutrition, food insecurity and HIV prevalence rates are high. Food insecurity can increase susceptibility to HIV infection by forcing people to engage in risky survival strategies. Once infected, malnutrition shortens the latency period of HIV infection, hastens the onset of AIDS, and ultimately death, and increases the risk of HIV transmission from mothers to babies . HIV/AIDS in turn heightens vulnerability to further food insecurity and poverty, by eroding the ability of households to produce food, generate income, and care for and feed family members.
In addition to documentation in medical studies, international bodies have recognized that malnutrition should be addressed in the context of the AIDS pandemic, among them UN AIDS, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Health Organization (WHO). On May 27, 2006, the 59th World Health Assembly approved a resolution that calls on member states to make nutrition an integral part of their national response to HIV and to act quickly to identify and implement nutrition interventions that can be integrated into HIV and AIDS programming.But while such policy pronouncements are laudable, to date there has been little coordinated multi-sector sustainable nutritional support for people living with HIV/AIDS.
As the recent UN Food Summit concluded with the need for "urgent and coordinated action" to raise food production and increase investment in agriculture, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the international climate has informed our own work with a greater sense of urgency and purpose. While it is significant that support for small farmers in the developing world has now been recognized on the global agenda, malnourished Rwandans cannot wait for international "calls to action" to be realized. In Rwanda, HIV-positive individuals are especially prone to malnutrition, food insecurity and limited access to land. GHI is working to enable people living with HIV/AIDS to grow their own way out of hunger through a small investment package.
Ongoing
We hope that the GHI model eventually will be integrated into the National Ministry of Health Protocol in Rwanda, removing any need for GHI to exist as a separate entity. We hope that just as ARVs become universal health policy for all Rwandans, so too will nutritional support through agriculture. We hope to continue to be involved at the intersection of nutrition, HIV/AIDS, and agricultural policy throughout our lives.
What is your age?
20
How did you hear about this competition?
Youth Venture. Romina Laouri
There is no activity associated with this entry
Take action: |
||
|
share this entry |
add to favorites |
|
|
discuss |
||
Quick Translate:
This Entry is about:
Links:
- 381 reads