KickStart, a social enterprise working to reduce poverty, has entered into a strategic partnership with ChildFund to empower smallholder farmers with irrigation technology to enhance food production and commercial farming. The higher yields will then help in tackling malnutrition among children in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa and increase farmers’ incomes through sell of surplus.
Target farmers will get training as well as KickStart’s MoneyMaker Irrigation pumps for small-scale farming to produce nutrient-rich food to counter the growing problem of malnutrition among children in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia and Mozambique.
Malnutrition has ravaged many children, particularly in rural areas, due to the unreliable food supply and in some cases, the complete lack of food. Statistics from UN 2022 The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, indicate that the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet around the world rose to almost 3.1 billion in 2021.
KickStart’s MoneyMaker Irrigation pumps are easy to use and maintain as they do not use fuel or electricity, making them ideal for smallholder farmers who have limited resources and technical expertise.
Chege Ngugi, ChildFund’s Regional Africa Director said this will contribute to building sustainable livelihoods and the resilience of smallholder farmers to changing climate through climate-smart agriculture techniques that improve land productivity in the short and long term.
KickStart designs and mass-markets climate-smart irrigation technology to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to enable transition from subsistence agriculture to commercial irrigated agriculture.
Peter Juma, chief operations officer at KickStart International, said the partnership will harness its well-established irrigation technologies and agro-preneurship training to equip smallholder farmers with the means to boost their productivity and incomes.
KickStart and ChildFund believe by joining forces, they can make a meaningful impact in ending child hunger and malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.