Nusaibah and Her Grandmother: Planting Together
KANO STATE, NIGERIA — Nineteen-year-old Nusaibah Usman is a high school graduate awaiting admission to study at Bayero University Kano. She lives with her parents and 75-year-old grandmother in the university’s staff quarters, where one day she attended an East-West Seed Knowledge Transfer Foundation (EWS-KT) training that changed her life.
“Waking up each day, all I think of is my farm,” she told us, beaming, “and I go there daily to see how my plants are doing.”
“Waking up each day, all I think of is my farm, and I go there daily to see how my plants are doing.”
A member of EWS-KT’s technical field staff came to train the women at the university’s staff quarters. Nusaibah accompanied her mother to one of the training sessions, and that spurred her interest in farming. “The Technical Field Officer began to train us in core groups before I decided to have my own farm to replicate all I had been taught,” said Nusaibah.
Her consistency in attending trainings contributed to the speed with which she was able to adopt all the EWS-KT techniques, from seedling production to raised beds, mulching, and fertilization. Nusaibah has also been passing on to her grandmother the new techniques she learned from the trainings.
Her parents have been very supportive of her agricultural endeavors and have provided funds for her to purchase different seed varieties from East-West Seed, including okra, cucumber, cauliflower, tomato, carrot, sweet pepper, and cabbage.
Upon our visit to her 500-square-metre farm, which is just behind her house, we saw Nusaibah teaching her grandmother trellising and how to apply organic mulching materials.
“I have come to love every technique on modern vegetable farming, and I’ll not just stop at teaching my grandma but also my fellow females to embrace farming as a way of life,” she said. “I am so grateful to EWS-KT for the knowledge gained and to the trainer for her relentless efforts in seeing that we the young girls of the quarters are not left out of the training on good agronomic practices.”
Transforming Nigeria’s Vegetable Markets contributes to more resilient and more efficient vegetable production by introducing new varieties, adapted technologies, and evidence-based knowledge and skills. Making vegetables more widely available on the market at affordable prices will lead to improved nutrition among local, low-income households in Kaduna and Kano states. This project is co-funded by SDG Partnership Facility, a grant program of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign affairs managed by RVO. This project is led by EWS-KT in collaboration with our partners Wageningen University & Research, Solidaridad Network West Africa, Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry Kaduna State, and Ahmadu Bello University.
