“Vegetable garden a door to exit poverty for me and my children"

Having been going at their vegetable farming project for seven years, members of Mpalane Garden Association were beginning to lose hope when there was little income to show for their efforts.

Whatever they planted often got destroyed by livestock coming into the garden and eating anything that was beginning to sprout.

“We did not have any fencing and used tree branches to fence the garden, but livestock would just enter and destroy our garden whenever they wanted to,” explains Taylor Ndwandwe, Mpalane Garden Association’s Chairperson.

Ndwandwe says the association was founded in 2005, with around 15 members, but this number later dwindled to 10, including nine women and one man, who persevered despite not benefitting or seeing much profit from the business.

This perseverance paid off for the 10 when they approached World Vision in 2012, requesting assistance. The international humanitarian organisation supported the association with fencing material that included gates, two water tanks, irrigation pipes, and seedlings. In addition, World Vision provided technical and business-specific training to the members so they could maintain and reach healthy profits from their gardening business. Today, the association grows and sells vegetables such as beetroot, butternut, tomatoes and cabbages.

“This garden has truly been the door to exiting poverty for me and my children, since World Vision intervened in 2012 and helped us,” the Chairperson states.

She says her family now no longer struggles to put food on the table and they eat healthily, while children’s school fees are also easily paid.

“Listen, my house has floor tiles as I speak, as if we work in high paying jobs; mind you, I used to smear my floors with cow dung back in the day,” narrates a beaming Ndwandwe.

She lamented the fact that World Vision was leaving the Matsanjeni Area Programme (AP) on the 30th September 2022, saying as members of the Mpalane Garden Association, they were devastated because they had come to rely on World Vision’s support for any challenges they encountered.

“We are saddened by the closure of this office because this organisation has been our father and mother. We’ll always be grateful though as they move on to support other communities, mostly because they have left us with projects that will provide for us even after they are long gone,” Ndwandwe adds.

For the past 19 years, World Vision’s Matsanjeni Area Programme team made sure that the underprivileged from the community felt the organisation’s love and support. Mpalane Garden Association is a living witness to this as their lives have been transformed by the gardening business. They have become resilient to challenges faced along the way, including fluctuating market prices and late payments, something they said does pose a challenge to them from time to time; however, they remain positive for the future.