May Update

SFHC has been busy during May. In order to reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission, SFHC has divided the staff into several teams who work on various SFHC projects independently at the SFHC office. Teams only come in once or twice a week to prevent the possible spread of infection. 

Three groups have been doing work in the permaculture garden. The first group has been working on the vegetable gardens and also making compost to apply to the different fields.  The second group has been weeding in the orchard which contains a variety of fruits such as bananas, mangoes, avocados, and tangerines. The third group has been working on the center by incorporating crop residue from legumes and cereals grown last rainy season in the fields to improve soil quality for the next growing season. 

In the groups that are not based in the permaculture there has also been a lot of progress. One group has been doing yield assessments for the InnovAfrica project. Yield assessments focus on harvesting, shelling,weighing and taking the moisture content of maize, bambara nuts, groundnut, millet, beans and sorghum. Another group is focused on making concrete bricks as part of the Biovision project. These bricks are for the construction of the dormitories where people who will be coming for training at the center will be accommodated.

The final group has been working on the FARMS4Biodiversity project doing yield assessment for the students research projects and been doing COVID-19 outreach with farmers. The COVID-19 training taught a total of 240 people in 24 areas about COVID-19 and how to prevent the spread of infection. The rest of the SFHC team trained 2973 people from 216 villages with the help of promoters who go on to train people in their own villages. During these training sessions about 10-20 people were trained at a time and outside while observing social distance. At the end of the presentation SFHC gave farmers masks, gloves, soap and sanitizer to farmers to protect them from spreading the disease. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *