Green Living Down Under
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are 1 billion hungry people in the world, most of who live in poor rural areas. As the world’s population is set to hit 7 billion, policy-makers are struggling to find ways to nourish our planet’s growing population.
In Nangabo, a small county in south central Uganda, many families are struggling to put food on the table. But families with children with physical or developmental disabilities have an additional financial burden.
For most women living in rural and remote parts of India, the day begins as early as 3:00am. The flour for the day’s meals needs grinding, livestock need to be fed, breakfast needs to be cooked, and water needs to be carried from wells, rivers, and streams. And that’s all before the children—usually just the [...]
“The idea was to bring a lot of expertise from the corporate world to help young social start ups,” says Fred Rose when asked about his motivation for founding the Acara Institute two years ago.
In Kenya, for the over 5,000 people living in rural communities on or near its shore, Lake Victoria—the largest body of freshwater in Africa—is a life line.
Throughout the Sahel, recurrent drought since the late 1960’s is turning once crop covered land into desert. And the sand is spreading. Picked up by wind, dunes created by soil particles from the West African coastline and the Sahel are covering villages, roads, crops, and irrigation systems, making it increasingly difficult to farm and maintain [...]
Around 1 million people in South Africa—the majority of whom are recent arrivals from the former apartheid homelands, Transkei and Ciskei— live in the shacks that make up Khayelitsha, Nyanga and the area surrounding the Cape Flats outside Cape Town. Just under half, or 40 percent, of the population is unemployed, while the rest barely [...]
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people are forced to travel long distances and spend hours at a time collecting the water needed for cooking and drinking from far away streams or wells. But the residents of Cabazane, South Africa have found a much less labor intensive alternative. They use gravity and let water come [...]
Listen to Radio Fanaka Fana and Radio Jigiya, in the Fana and Zégoua regions of Mali, and you are much more likely to hear tips for improving compost piles and soil quality than you are pop music hits or current events. That’s because the station is participating in Farm Radio International’s Africa Farm Radio Research [...]
As climate change worsens, and fresh water availability grows more erratic, the food security of small-scale farmers throughout Africa will increasingly depend on their water management abilities. Luckily, the tools for improving water management already exist.
