Among the many ongoing projects, in 2019 we started a collaboration with the humanitarian organization HUMANA People to People Italia, leader in the enhancement of used clothes, and 2020 will be the year in which the fruits of this project will be reaped. With this short article we want to make a first assessment of this initiative.
A first milestone
In 2019 we donated 16,460 kg of new garments to Humana that we had in stock which were so reused by needy people. In addition to this first obvious advantage, the “reuse” also saved 98,760,000 liters of water, avoided the use of 4,938 kg of pesticides, 9,876 kg of fertilizers and an emission of 59,256 kg of carbon dioxide.
The next steps
Thanks also to our collaboration, HUMANA Italia was able to support the Farmers’ Club project in the district of Dowa, Malawi.
The goal is to contribute to the social and economic empowerment of small farmers in the Dowa district, ensuring their skills to produce healthy and quality food for the subsistence of their families and to develop commercial activities that can guarantee them a economic independence and, on a larger scale, local economic development.
The objective is pursued by implementing key activities, which start from the training of small farmers both to develop their technical skills in the field of conservative and sustainable agriculture, and to ensure their literacy or the ability to manage budgets and planning.
More specifically, in the first half of 2019, also thanks to the support of our company, about 6 thousand growers were involved, organized in 80 clubs and 7 Cooperatives, especially in the areas of the traditional authorities of Msakambewa, Mkukula, Chackhaza and Dzoole of the district from Dowa.
The use of conservative agriculture allows to mitigate the effects of climate change, ensuring soil fertility in the medium to long term: this is possible, for example, thanks to the rotation of crops and the planting of new trees. Furthermore, farmers are giving priority to the production of soybeans and sunflowers because they are products with higher demand and salable at higher prices.
With the aim of giving continuity to their training, farmers use the so-called “model gardens” as a space to experiment with the new techniques learned.
Thanks to the existence of 7 Cooperatives, farmers can join forces, for example managing to store their products in a single space, attracting buyers there and helping to reduce the distances that farmers themselves have to travel to sell what they have collected.
All these interventions in 2020 will begin to bear fruit: here is a concrete example of environmental and social sustainability!
