Spar and Harvest save Lwandle pupils from hunger

Written by Zanele Majebe

Understanding the impact of poverty and the associated ills on academic performance, led urban Harvest, funded by Spar, to start a garden project at Lwandle Primary School. The aim of the garden was to help to feed school learners that come from a poverty stricken background, as well as providing gardening training to the teachers and community members.

I spoke to one of the teachers that benefited from the training – Mrs Nxawe, who took it upon herself to facilitate the gardening training project at Lwandle Primary School and at other neighbouring schools and community crèches around Khayelitsha.

‘’Poverty has become a barrier to effective learning in our schools. Through our observation  it has become apparent that one of the issues that causes low performance in classrooms is hunger: This causes lack of concentration resulting in high rates of absenteeism and ultimately a high number of school dropouts. The garden has helped us in so many ways: feeding hundreds of learners every day, creating employment for the community. Facilitating, natural science learning lessons and demonstrations, educating our learners about the importance of preservation and restoration of nature as well as exposing our learners to other environmental careers. It has also afforded us with an opportunity to see other birds species that we have never seen before’’ said Mrs Nxawe.

Challenges 

The challenge that Lwandle primary school garden is faced with is getting the right organic manure. There is also need for getting a borehole, net, seedlings and fork spades for weeding.

“We are most grateful to Harvest for their initiative and to Spar for funding the whole project as well as for the opportunity of learning that both organisations have afforded us’’ said Mrs Nxawe.

A Call to Action

Gondwana Alive’s intent is to train gardeners, promote green gardening and link green gardeners with potential employers through through an online directory service we are developing. We hope that some of the gardeners trained through Lwandle would like to learn green skills, register for our directory service and benefit from our promotional work.

Follow us for news on our GrowGreen gardening initiative on https://www.gondwanaalive.org/ and on our https://www.facebook.com/Gondwana-Alive-301608859975902/