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FEATURE

The women harvested leafy vegetables knowledge to grow their own vegetables The project made a tremendous impact
from the bag gardens several times. Six based on the training received. This on vulnerable women. In their words:
of them have established bag gardens at assisted in increasing the community’s “Before the project, we used to go to the
home. The Imvelo Food Garden project diet diversity. The project beneficiaries robots to beg but now we don’t need
helped the Cemetery View households to developed a commitment to vegetable to because we are getting tomatoes,
have vegetables incorporated into family production and continued to replant green vegetables and eggs through our
meals, and provided them with skills and the bags throughout the year (Figure 5). project”.

Figure 5: Growing cabbage in empty maize meal bags at the Imvelo food garden.

The ARC, in partnership with the NRF system was exhibited both outdoors and governmental organisations and religious
and DSI, established a complete, fully indoors (Figure 6). groups. All of them showed interest in
functional maize meal bag system at the acquiring knowledge on crop production
Cofimvaba Training Centre, Eastern Cape Since the inception of the project (February using relatively simple, affordable, space-
Province, and trained a group of ten people 2022), the Cofimvaba Training Centre has efficient, climate-smart agricultural
who would be responsible for agricultural received more than 20 visits from different technologies such as the maize meal bag
knowledge sharing and dissemination primary schools, consisting of learners, system.
amongst the youth. The maize meal bag teachers, agricultural entrepreneurs, non- n

Figure 6: Establishment of an outdoor (left) and indoor (right) maize meal bag system and training of trainers at the
Cofimvaba Training Centre in the Eastern Cape Province.

12 Landscape SA • Issue 117 2022