School Gardens curriculum/Topic development

Last Friday Ubunthu successfully held a meeting with teachers from Nakeempa and Shalom Secondary Schools to plan and come up with topics that can be introduced alongside the existing School curriculum in Agriculture.
The meeting provided an opportunity for Ubunthu to:

1. Share project updates and Discuss project progress and achievements with Schools.
2. Exchange ideas and Share best practices and challenges the School Gardens are currently facing.
3. Plan how best we can incorporate agriculture as a lucrative business in line with the existing Agricultural Subject for pupils.
4. Come up with Topics to be in cooperated in the Agriculture Curriculum for the leaners.

The Discussions also provided for teachers to be equipped with hands on information on how best to run the school gardens in a way that the pupils will learn and adapt to the best agricultural practices.
They shared some of the most effective ways to relay information about agriculture as a business to pupils and how no one should be left out including pupils who are not in classes that learn agriculture.
Some topics were identified as a must addition to the Agriculture curriculum in order to provide a hands-on lessons that will taught to the pupils as follows:

1. Soil rejuvenation: Under this topic the pupils will learn about Manure production, Intercropping and crop diversification.
2. Farming as a business: This topic includes discussions of Basic Business planning, Basic financial learning, profit making and incurring Losses in farming business.
3. Food and Nutrition: Just like other topics above this will be more practical as it will take the pupils on a journey of learning how to prepare meals from all the crops produced from the gardens.
   They will also learn the nutritional value of the different crops they will be producing.
4. Pest and disease control: This topic will bring in lessons from Land preparation, weeding, spraying and plant nurturing in general. They will also learn about specifications when it comes to the amount and measurements of the chemicals needed and mixtures.
5. Horticulture: Pupils will learn how profitable it is to farm during off rain season and how crops become profitable during that time.
   To make the school gardens even more fun for the pupils, when the products from the school gardens are ready they will not only be sold to make profit but also be fed to the pupils during the actual School feeding program.

As of the 16th of May 2025 the schools had already harvested the cow peas from the Gardens and land preparations have already began in readiness for planting other off season crops such as Cabbage, Carrots, white eggplants ,Tomatoes, Rape and winter Maize.
The Senior Head teacher for Nakeempa thanked Ubunthu for the life changing project only for the pupils but for the teachers as well as they are also drawing lessons from the project and can implement at their household as well looked forward to exploring more on Agriculture with Ubunthu.
The role-out of the topics above begins within this month of May 2025.
Ubunthu intends to role the project to at least Five(5)other Schools in Choma District by October this year.