{"id":5536,"date":"2019-06-18T15:43:02","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T14:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/selfhelpafrica.org\/us\/?p=5536"},"modified":"2019-06-21T10:16:49","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T09:16:49","slug":"better-education-through-local-field-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/selfhelpafrica.org\/us\/better-education-through-local-field-school\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;BETTER&#8217; school for Merinda"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">24-year-old Merinda attends a school that doesn\u2019t have a teacher. Neither does it have walls, books, or a blackboard!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But Merinda Kafunda wakes at 5am every Friday morning, and looks forward to the long walk she must make to her \u2018school\u2019 in Chitipa District in northern Malawi.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Merinda attends a \u2018field school\u2019, a rural farm-training center that is one of over 13,000 such facilities to have been established across Malawi by \u2018BETTER\u2019, an EU-backed project that is promoting training and education to farmers in a range of new practices that will help them to grow enough food in the face of a changing climate.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Merinda\u2019s \u2018Mbanangwa Farmer Field School\u2019 has its own demonstration plot where techniques and plant varieties are tested. Their teacher is a member of the community who has brought to the Mbanangwa school the learning that they have received, attending \u2018training of trainer\u2019 programmes organised by Self Help Africa across the country.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a region that has endured erratic rainfall patterns for many years, Merinda says that even in the short number of years that she has been farming, she has witnessed drought, floods and rains that are almost impossible to predict.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She is optimistic too, that the \u2018pit planting\u2019 techniques that she learned at her field school will give her better yields in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Explaining the approach, Merinda describes how they dig holes exactly where they will plant, and then fertilise each \u2018pit\u2019 with compost manure and animal dung. Once their plants are in the ground they water each hole individually, and cover each with stalks and stems to prevent the moisture from evaporating. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This year, the mother of two young children expects to harvest over 130 kilograms of maize from her small farm, using this pit planting technique. &nbsp;\u201cPreviously, I used to harvest 40 kilograms of maize. It only lasted us for four months, when I would need to work for others to get food for my family, or else look for hand-outs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Across Malawi, 402,000 households are set to benefit from the five-year \u2018BETTER\u2019 project, whose overall objective is to use farmer field schools to increase household resilience to shocks, and to improve the food, nutrition and income security of smallholder farming families.<\/span><\/p><figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/selfhelpafrica.org\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2019\/06\/IMG_2444-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5533\"\/><\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Merinda receives farming education through EU funded BETTER project at local &#8216;field school&#8217; in Malawi<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/selfhelpafrica.org\/us\/better-education-through-local-field-school\/\"> Read More<\/a>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5531,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[659,661,684,677,637],"tags":[68,71,90,426,70,211],"class_list":["post-5536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture-nutrition","category-cooperatives","category-development-education","category-malawi","category-news","tag-agriculture","tag-development","tag-development-education","tag-education","tag-farming","tag-malawi"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v23.4 (Yoast SEO v23.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Merinda Gets BETTER Education With Field School - Self Help Africa USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Merinda receives farming education through EU funded BETTER project at one a local &#039;field school&#039;, one of 13,000 such facilities across Malawi\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/selfhelpafrica.org\/us\/better-education-through-local-field-school\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&#039;BETTER&#039; 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