Girl power digs a better future for African women

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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day,’ says the old proverb. ‘Show him how to catch a fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’

The saying, dreamed up in 1890 by Anne Ritchie, eldest daughter of Vanity Fair author William Thackeray, still rings true today. Which is why 18 senior women from UK grocery have made it their mission to transform a patch of uncultivated farmland into a fish pond teeming with tilapia.

It’s going to be tough. The end result is not going to resemble the fish ponds you find dotted around gardens in the UK. It’s going to be a whopping 5,000 sq ft -the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It will also be 1.2m deep. In short, it’s going to be hot, dusty, back-breaking work. And they’ve got just three days to complete it.

Fortunately they will have some serious motivation to keep them going. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in three people are under-nourished. Children go to bed hungry every night. Smallholder farmers struggle to put food on the table, pay for medicine or send their children to school. Which is where Farm Africa comes in.

Fish pond facts

27c Temperatures are expected to reach 27c during the dig

1,500 The number of fish the 5,000 sq ft pond will hold

2,250 The number of fish the pond will hold after a year

10% of the fish to be eaten by the farming family

90% of the fish to be sold, with priority given to the local community

Farm Africa is a charity that believes in educating and supporting African farmers so they can grow enough food to feed their families, before eventually producing enough to start selling what they have left over. Its latest initiative is called Food for Good, which involves figures from the food and drink industry undertaking three gruelling challenges to raise awareness and money so the charity can continue its work.

A group of chefs will scale the heights of Mount Kilimanjaro in August, a group of industry leaders will trek 135km across the Great Rift Valley in September and next month there is the enormous fish pond project known as Dig for Good.

The 18 women flying to Western Kenya in April will work flat out alongside a co-operative of 16 local women to dig the fish pond, with the ultimate aim of setting up a family from the rural community of Kisumu as fish farmers.

Elsewhere in the region, land and the fishponds are usually owned by men, despite women doing all the labour. However, Dig for Good is focused on women working with women, so once it has dug the pond it will be the women in the community who are set up to become fish-farming entrepreneurs, just like Joyce Kadenge from Kenya.

Before Food for Good arrived on the scene, Kadenge had a small area of land where she grew maize and beans. However, she was often unable to produce enough food from the land to feed her family. Very occasionally she grew enough surplus to make githero, a maize and bean dish, which she sold at the local market to generate a very small income.

Kadenge, who is in her 50s, was set up by Food for Good in the fish business last year. She says her new life as a fish farmer is a lot less physically demanding compared with the work she did before. She also hopes it will be more profitable than producing and selling githero.

Women working with women

The AFULA co-operative, with whom the industry leaders will be building the fishpond, are an enterprising lot in their own right. Started by five women in 2009, the women joined forces so that, rather than just weeding their own farms, they could weed others within the neighbourhood and make more money. The group has since expanded to 16 women and become more organised, developing a constitution and electing a steering committee.

“If the fish can do well and I can get some money, I plan to buy enough food for my children,” she says. “The small ones and my grandson can go to school because of the money from the fish.”

When it comes to learning the business, the budding fish farmers will be in good hands. Among the 18 women jetting into Africa will be Greencore group technical director Helen Sisson, Bakkavör group technical director Ann Savage and Sainsbury’s brand director Judith Batchelar, a Farm Africa trustee since 2012.

“I have a particular interest in the work Farm Africa is doing to build the skills and abilities of women farmers,” says Batchelar. “Training enterprising women to farm effectively and sustainably will feed families, nurture communities, help children be educated and build a new generation of skilled African businesswomen.”

You can find out how the group gets on in The Grocer, which will be reporting on progress live from Kisumu thanks to our publisher Lorraine Hendle, who is part of the team digging the pond.

We will also be revisiting the fish pond in a year to catch up with the farming family and see how they are getting on with the new business - and to examine whether Anne Ritchie’s theory has stood the test of time and a successful legacy has been left for the Kisumu community.