Micro-farming among the poor Cape Town

Dear Friends of Abalimi via Global Giving,

this is just to say a HUGE and earnest thank you to all who have donated over the past months .

There is nothing more fertile than a gift well given, except perhaps the gift we get from good healthy farmyard manure !!! :)

And your gifts are truly living rain to our work among the poor in Cape Town.

The micro-farmers are very busy planting the new season's crops and the gardens are looking beautiful and abundant- beacons of hope and joy in a sea of poverty and desperation for formal jobs which do not come. Unemployment in Cape Town is growing - the gap between rich and poor is so wide we get culture shock daily !! Unemployment stands officially at around 30% with more formal jobs being lost daily, even while the very healthy GDP of the formal SA economy earns good profits for the few.

Since we won our Impumelelo Gold Award (see previous report) , we have had at least 10 other agencies countrywide ask if they can come to study our model, with more making queries all the time.

So please do continue to assist us to keep our model thriving and growing so that it can be copied everywhere.

We believe that we are the first in South Africa and possibly in the whole of Africa to prove empirically that fresh food hunger and cash starvation in urban centers is entirely avoidable, even in the worst situations. Hundreds and thousands of uneducated, unemployable people - with your help - are right now setting up and running their micro-farms on very very tiny plots, on wasteland, at home and in community gardens, sustain-ably and cheaply. And these tiny micro-farms , built on any bit of wasteland, are also creating hundreds of genuine permanent self-help jobs among the unemployable for the first time in South Africa !!

Remember that there is no farmer in the world- especially big farmers - who can survive without a minimum of permanent subsidized support. And this goes also for family micro-farmers among the poor, who need so little -only ZAR 100 per month or USD 13 per month - to provide the essential services which they cannot afford.

So thank you one and all, all and one, for your kind and excellent support.

I look forward to posting more reports in future and wish you all the very best !!

Rob Small

P.S. dont forget to come visit on a Tuesday morning 9am-12pm, every Tuesday, if you are in Cape Town. Tuesday is market day and visitors day combined!!