G-BIACK: Growing a Better Future

G-BIACK co-founders Peris and Samuel Nderitu, in the Demonstration and Teaching Garden at G-BIACK.

Kenya's population has passed the 44 million mark and the country is facing serious food shortages and widespread malnutrition.

In 2008, husband and wife team Samuel and Peris Nderitu started a small non-profit in Thika, Kenya to try to create a solution to this problem through sustainable agriculture education. They called it the Grow Biointensive Agricultural Center of Kenya (G-BIACK, online at g-biack.org).

An action-oriented, practical and visionary organization, G-BIACK has partnered with Ecology Action, a U.S. non-profit established in 1971, which pioneered the revolutionary GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-Farming method. G-BIACK
is already helping over 8,000 Kenyan small-scale farmers to restore and maintain the fertility of their soil organically and to use highly productive, sustainable, organic food growing methods. In addition to Kenyans, farmers from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, South Sudan, Nigeria, DR. Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Mexico have interned at G-BIACK.

But requests for these training programs are expanding, and G-BIACK's budget is simply not sufficient to meet the demand. Samuel and Peris often do without to make sure their staff is paid and that people in need receive training even if they cannot afford to pay for it. As the demand for training has increased, essential teaching opportunities have been missed due to lack of funding. Several staff members have been lost to higher paying jobs.

The training G-BIACK provides can literally mean the difference between life and death for many people, but adequate funding is needed for the program to move forward.

To enable G-BIACK to build its organizational capacity and extend its proven training programs, funding of $100,000 USD is urgently needed to cover the next 6 months of operation, teaching and outreach. With this funding, G-BIACK will have the capacity to directly train approximately 4,000 people by the end of the year — including both the standard program of sustainable agriculture training, as well as training thousands of women and girls in additional valuable skills such as tailoring, bead work, solar cooking, nutrition and health, which will empower them to live productive, dignified, and self reliant lives. Each of the 4,000 people trained through G-BIACK's efforts pledges to teach three of their neighbors the skills that they learn, and in this way, it is projected that an estimated 16,000 people will have been directly and indirectly trained as a result of G-BIACK's project activities this year alone.

Ecology Action (G-BIACK's fiscal sponsor, online at growbiointensive.org) is initiating this crowd-funding campaign to raise the $100,000 G-BIACK needs this year. Each dollar donated is a vital step into a better, healthier, happier and more sustainable world. Each donor can make the difference between a life of sorrow and a life of joy and good health for a family in Kenya.