By Coletta Wanjohi
As day breaks, Mary Muthoni heads across the Kibagare football stadium in Kenya’s capital Nairobi that separates a patch of farmland from the informal settlement where she lives.
The mother of three hops over a wide ditch to get to her section of the shared farm. Today, she is planting a type of vegetable that she says grows faster and translates into quicker returns.
For over two decades, this small strip of land has been the source of food and livelihood for 40-odd families living in the informal settlement.
Each pays between $50 and $100 biannually to grow crops on designated patches of varying sizes. The areas are mostly small, sometimes barely enough to harvest maybe three bags of maize.
“I farm kales and spinach mainly, and sometimes maize. Every morning, I harvest the produce, put these on a wheelbarrow and go around the residential area selling the day’s stock,” Muthoni explains to TRT Afrika.
In another part of the farmland, two women are harvesting spinach and stashing the produce into a sack.
“We don’t farm here, but we come daily to pick vegetables, then call the owner of the patch we have harvested to tell us how much it costs,” one of the women says.
Ditching buckets for generators
For 5kg bag of spinach, for instance, they pay the farmer $2. The spinach is then divided into smaller bundles and sold at the Kangemi market in Nairobi, where the sellers make an extra $2.
Some of the produce is sold in stalls at Kibagare village, while varying quantities find their way into neighbouring Kangemi and other marketplaces in the city. The rest is consumed at home.
At the farm, a man arrives carrying a generator and long plastic water pipes. The farmers seem excited enough to call out to him, each asking to be served first.
It doesn’t take long to fathom that Kevin Momina’s presence is crucial to the farm’s existence. Without him, the farmers would be forced to carry buckets full of water from the ditch to irrigate their respective patches.
Momina places the generator near the ditch, connects the pipes and pumps water to any of the plots on request. He charges between $3 and $6, depending on the size of the patch.
“During the dry season, we are forced to use water from the ditch despite the presence of pollutants.
There is a clean source of water that flows to specific points in this residential area every day at 9 in the morning,” Momina tells TRT Afrika.
“That water flows through to this ditch too. We let it flow through until it pushes away the waste, I then pump the cleaner water to the farm,” he adds.
Food at a cost
Farm Africa, a non-governmental organisation that helps small farmers in eastern Africa grow more produce, says that if done well, urban farming can assist many in informal settlements get both food and income.
The flip side is that overcrowding in such areas has led to limited resources for residents, many of whom are vulnerable to malnutrition and other poverty-related illnesses.
The ditch, the only source of water for the Kibagare farm, has become a channel where human and other waste from the residential area pass daily.
The dark colour, thickness and stench of the water here, every day early in the morning, speaks of how much waste it carries.
“We lack a good centralised system of collecting waste of all kinds,” says Muthoni. “We have been urging residents in this informal settlement of ours not to throw things into the ditch because it is the same water that we depend on to irrigate the vegetables that we eat.”
The local pharmacist in Kibagare village says it is common for people to come and buy medicines over the counter to relieve stomach ache.
“It is hard to tell if the stomach problems are directly related to the water from the ditch being used to irrigate the plants that they ended up eating. There may be other causes,” Sophie Murage, the pharmacist, tells TRT Afrika.
A group of young people like her has been volunteering to sensitise the community about the importance of proper waste management.
Hope for cleaner water
“We can only advice our fellow residents on the importance of a clean water source for this farm, because all of us get our food from here,” says Peter George, one of the members of the group. “But the problem is that without them getting an alternative, residents end up waiting for the night to pour waste into this same ditch when no one can see them.”
Mary Njuguna, a resident of the settlement, says nobody in the neighbourhood can afford not to use the farmland just because they are near a polluted ditch.
“For many, the farm is the lone source of income, and the village needs the food that comes from here,” she says.
Momina, for his part, has resolved to refuse any requests from clients before 9am, by which time the waste swimming in the ditchwater would have cleared a bit.
“I usually come here early enough, 8 in the morning most of the time, but I just sit on my generator until I am convinced that the water is clear enough to pump. Even if a farmer offers me more money to pump earlier I cannot, this is our food, so I must ensure I pump clean water because I buy these same vegetables too,” he says.
Residents of the Kibagare informal settlement say their hope for cleaner water for their farms rests on the newly elected governor of Nairobi city.
They have joined social media campaigns by other informal settlements in the city to demand that he delivers his campaign promise of setting up proper waste management.
Till that happens, on Momina’s shoulders lie both social responsibility and the burden of business.
