Meeting Needs is helping to develop a school farm in Tanzania that will teach basic agricultural skills to pupils while enabling them to cultivate their own food, improving nutrition and educational outcomes.

The Primary school in Oldendereti in Northern Tanzania has been given an acre of land to be used as a school farm with the primary purpose of cultivating food but it will also be used as learning space.

The Meeting Needs grant of £4,515 will ´top up´ the £15,647 that has been raised to date by Livingstone Tanzania Trust to complete the project.

Partnerships Officer for Livingstone Tanzania Trust, Lyndsey McLellan said: “Poor diet is hindering the growth of the children and their ability to learn and is impacting their future. We can do something about it because we have built school farms in the past to improve children´s diet and give them a better future.”

Lyndsey said that within a year they can grow greens, bananas, avocado and papaya and many other crops all year round, to improve the nutritional intake of the students at lunchtime. Additionally, it can provide agricultural education for the local Maasai people that are not experienced in cultivating land for food.

Meeting Needs chair Chris Parnham said: “This is the sort of sustainable and practical project that we have supported many times in the past and will seriously impact the lives of its 358 students and their families.  There are many similar examples of other projects where this method of imparting knowledge through ‘land learning´ has been hugely successful”.

The project will fence the land from hungry animals, create a small reservoir to irrigate the crops with a solar/powered pump, purchase seeds, banana suckers and fruit trees to create a 500 strong banana orchard alongside mango, avocado and papaya trees. The farm will produce vegetables within 6 months, bananas within 12-18 months and other fruit within 3-4 years.

The cost includes a salary for a farm hand for the first two years until this can be paid with the sales of 15 per cent of the bananas. The greens produced will be added to the school meals to enrich their nutrition while the fruit will be shared amongst the school children each day.

The farm will also be used for outside learning for maths, biology, geography and ‘work study’ classes.

The children at Oldendereti Primary School are currently fed a diet of maize and beans every day, a diet sorely lacking in fruit and vegetables. This project will reverse that.