Green houses boost education in St. John Primary School

At the primary school of St. John School in Lokichoggio, located in the  Turkana District (North of Kenya), there are 1,260 students. Until few months ago they had only 11 teachers and the students’ meals depended entirely on the food delivered to them by the World Food Programme, due to the complicated situation of food insecurity in the area.

Turkana is an area easily affected by droughts and floods. Therefore, food production and food security problems are prevalent. Most of the local communities are traditionally nomadic-pastoralists and do not invest in building infrastructure that could change this trend. Furthermore, the access to education for children is also a delicate issue. First of all, it is difficult for a child coming from a semi-nomadic community to attend school, as parents are moving frequently and are not aware of the importance of education: young boys are often working in the field or taking care of the family’s animals, while young girls are often staying at home or get married at a very early age. Secondly, the existing schooling structures are very few and quite poorly equipped.

St John’s school is an exception, with its high numbers of students. In addition, being a boarding school St John allows students to leave their families during the academic year and studying without worrying about the movement of the family and food scarcity. However, the school has problems delivering high standard of education: the classrooms are over crowded and the teachers not enough for the numbers of students. Also, the high number of pupils is a challenge in terms of food supply. This year, only 50 students are benefiting from the boarding service of the school. Offering a meal a day to every student was possible through the help of the World Food Programme.

In January 2012, thanks to the Kenya Drought Recovery Programme funded by Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (UNDP), two green houses were set up in the school’s compound. The programme also facilitated the water supply for the school and the green houses through a pipeline that links to the borehole of the St. John’s catholic mission close by. Mr. Mwangi Muraguri, a teacher of Math and Swahili, has taken the responsibility to coordinate the green houses and teach the children how to grow and take care of vegetable plants. “At the beginning most of the students did not know anything about how to grow a plant and they did not know what a pair of shears was. The students are now enjoying learning agricultural techniques. They feel responsible for their tomatoes and they can see the result of their work at lunch time on their plates”, commented Mr Muraguri. In January, the green houses were seeded with tomatoes and sukuma wiki (kales). The production of sukuma wiki lasted from April to June, when a disease infected the plant. The tomato production has been constant and ongoing. First of all, the vegetables were added to the school’s menu and improved the children’s diet, secondly they were sold to the local community. As third, through the sales the school was able to hire 2 part-time teachers to help coping with the high number of students.

“The production was so successful that with the income generated by the green houses, we were able to hire other two extra teachers and increase the quality of teaching in the classes, that were sometimes too crowded with more than 100 students per teacher”, explained Mr. Mwangi. “Now we are already preparing to plant more tomatoes and if the production goes well, we might decide also to hire more teachers and try to reduce classes to a maximum of 80 students”. In the meantime, Mr. Mwangi is planning to train other teachers and pupils on the techniques of green house farming, in order to give continuity to the project. The total of the production of the year until now has been of 72.000 Kenyan shillings. The new teachers were hired from May and paid 5.000 Kenyan shillings a month. Part of the production has been used within the school to improve the pupils’ diet, while part of the money is kept to cover the expenses of the maintenance of the green house. 

The school’s achievements have been also inspiring the local community. A women’s group coming to buy the products from the green house was really impressed with the efficiency of the structure and is currently thinking of finding a way of establishing their own green house to start their own business.