Sowing seeds for the future in Dodoma, Tanzania

Like most parents, Alex and Grace embrace every opportunity to improve their family’s quality of life. Being small-scale farmers in Dodoma, Tanzania, those opportunities have at times been few and far between. Increasingly unreliable rainfall makes farming a risky business in this area. ‘If you plant sorghum or sunflower, and then you fail to get the rains, the crops will fail, so there is a total loss because there has been an investment in seed,’ Alex explains. They also face challenges getting their produce to market and, having overcome that hurdle, there is another: ‘the market is selective, so if the product is not of great quality, you can’t access it’, says Alex. Alex and Grace aren’t people who give up easily though, so when the opportunity arose for Alex to take part in Farm Africa’s Climate-Smart Agriculture project, funded by the World Food Programme, two years ago, they seized it. Alex received training on how to improve the soil, proper use of fertiliser and ...