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Learning to farm better

Mwanahawa Msikirwa lives in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, with her husband and three children aged 19, 12 and nine.

Farming is a way of life for the family, but they are using only half their ten-acre farm to grow pineapples and maize. The rest is left fallow because they don’t have enough money to invest in planting.

Like many other local farmers, they rarely have enough food to eat from one harvest to another and often go to bed hungry.

They also cannot meet many basic needs, such as school costs, medical treatment and other expenses.

Many farmers in the area grow pineapples that they process into dried fruit, jam and juice. But they face challenges accessing more lucrative markets because they lack the knowledge and skills to produce high-quality products.

Since last year, Farm Africa has been supporting Mwanahawa and other women farmers to produce pineapple products that are good enough to receive quality certification.

They’ve been given a scale so each farmer knows exactly how much produce she’s sent to the group and how much has been sold on.

Mwanahawa has been appointed chair of the farmers’ group and is confident that by working as a group she and her colleagues will secure better prices from their harvest.

She said: “We are learning lots of new things. I hope we will get quality certification from the Tanzania Bureau of Standards so our products have more chance of reaching good markets.”

For Mwanahawa the benefits are already clear. She’s bought bricks to build a better toilet to replace the family’s old dilapidated latrine covered by palm leaves.

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