Garden for the Future is a permaculture partnership between Girls Education Collaborative and a girls school in Tanzania that is growing solutions to some of the most pressing problems the world faces today. Permaculture is a more sustainable approach to farming that encourages a holistic, ecologically-conscious lifestyle. Garden for the Future is a living lab that offers answers to questions about health and nutrition, of course, but also about climate change, gender equality, economic opportunity, and education.
In collaboration with Mainsprings and in partnership with the Kitenga Girls Secondary School, GEC has funded and is coordinating a pilot agriculture program to dynamically intersect educating girls and regenerative agriculture.
Garden for the Future will seed, as it were, the next generation of regenerative farmers
The pilot program will introduce adolescent African girls to the power and potential of permaculture to nurture their bodies, improve human health, and restore the planet.
Via school-based working farms, students will learn first-hand the strategies and purpose behind regenerative agriculture and witness the results and shorter-term impacts, such as:
- healthier and more varied food — at a lower cost
- crops less vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, such as unpredictable weather
- conservation of water, and
- restoration of the environment
They will also come to understand the longer-term impacts, such as:
- sequestering of carbon
- repair and saving of topsoil
- mitigating the pace of climate change
And societally, they (and staff and community members) will potentially be inspired to change their opinion about agriculture from something old to something new and exciting, and — hopefully — make collective impact in environmental restoration and mitigating climate change.
