Green team provides sufficient, diverse, and nutritious foods

"Matak" group means "Green" from Baucau municipality inspires other farmers after joining World Vision's program.

Juliao, 35 years old, as a Green group leader recognised that before they faced many challenges running their farm due to lack of knowledge and skills how to raise quality productions and minim of technical producers recommended.

"Before, my wife and I run the farm by ourselves. Even we have enough water, but it gave bad result on production on consuming and it has badly influenced marketing. When we have supported from World Vision, we started to create a group of each household from our community. I can see the good impact on raising our farm together. We received assistance through provide tools such as water tarps, sprayers, buckets, axes and superfood seeds such as beans, sweet potatoes and vegetables. World Vision also provides us with capacity building on raising quality farm and encourages us to apply Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture knowledge and skills to produce nutritious foods for family consumes".

While encouraging parents group on agriculture products, World Vision also educates them on healthy eating. Santina, 32 years old as a member of the Green group, feels satisfied with the results she sees now.

"My life depends on agriculture works. When harvesting time, I always give priority to the family consume because local foods have free organic and high nutrition for the family, especially for our kids' menus for every day consume. Our children enjoy eating healthy meals because we have varieties of foods planted on our farm. She also explains how they share the group's roles and responsibilities," says Santita

We share schedules and split into two teams. Some of them watering crops and others cleans the grass and take cares of other things. We plant and harvest together but sell our products in different markets in the order we get more income from different places. We save together our money and share the same amount at the end of the month. The money we get from selling our products to pay for our kids' school and buy household needs."

"World Vision keep supporting communities through regular monitoring to the farmers, checking their productions and link them to the markets. We encourage farmers to follow World Vision's guidelines, importantly, plant superfoods we provided and consume what they have a plant which has full of nutrition," said Jose da Silva, World Vision field staff.

As a result, World Vision has seen an enormous impact and improve farmers' knowledge and skills on Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture and diversity household demands on gender-equitable decision-making.