Gardening is a widely implemented intervention in development programming that can deliver positive results in nutrition, agricultural income and women’s empowerment. In Ethiopia, projects have used gardens to strengthen household resilience and nutrition. In Timor Leste, mothers were taught about gardens to increase dietary diversity. In Burkina Faso, large irrigated communal plots were successfully developed for women’s groups to support food diversification and revenue generation. In Kenya, farmers invested in shade netting to increase productivity for home consumption and market sales. In Nicaragua, farmers established highly commercial production plots linked to supermarkets.
With significant use of gardens in development programming, it is important to centralize good practices in a toolkit. As successful and sustainable garden interventions require expertise from many sectors—agriculture, nutrition, gender, water resources, marketing, postharvest handling, behavior change, and monitoring and evaluation—this toolkit reflects these sector-specific expertise. The Garden Toolkit draws on the experience of Catholic Relief Services field practitioners and shares insights across countries and continents in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Garden Toolkit Resources
- The Garden Resource Guide supports readers in refreshing their existing knowledge as well as learning how sector beyond their expertise support garden interventions
- The Garden Program Managers Guide offers a process that supports the program manager in validating the garden design and developing an implementation plan
- The Garden Porgram Managers Worksheet is a form that the program manager uses to capture key decisions made when he/she follows the process described in the Garden Program Manager Guide
- Establishing and Growing a Productive Garden Lesson Plans was developed for the Feed the Future Ethiopia Livelihoods for Resilience – Oromia project
- Establishing and Growing a Productive Garden Job Aids is used when delivering the lesson plans to community members to illustrate the key points and activities
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