Visit to Kangai Kananga Womens Group February 7, 2026

 By Teresa Mellish

    Last week, Ken, Gikundi and I visited some members of the Kangai Kananga Womens Group. We were looking forward to visiting them since they are new partners in the GROH project and we haven’t gotten to know them well yet. 

    All members of the Kangai Kanangya Womens group we visitedwere harvesting greens, like kale,  from their grow bags.  The said it was especially important to have the greens to feed their grandchildren. 

All members had some water in their water tanks harvested from rainfall.

    Helen, the first woman we visited had less water in her tank because she had a smaller house and thus had less gutters to harvest the rain water into her tank.

   Catherine, the second woman had a new house with more gutters and her tank was ¾ full. 

She had a donkey cart in her yard which she used to transport water and sell it to her neighbours. 

    The third woman, had a hand dug well on her farm which had salty water.  She was using this water to water her livestock using solar power to pump up the water. 

Over a lovely lunch with the group executive at the fourth home (which included delicious mukimo with goat stew  plus cut-up fruit including mango, oranges and watermelon) we heard their other needs including better stoves which produced less smoke. 

    Regrettably, we only had time to visit four of the forty twomembers. Gikundi told us that all members have grow bags and water tanks and all are suffering from the drought conditions.          Despite the drought, the four women welcomed us warmly. 

The drought is overwhelming. They planted  crops when it rained a couple of months ago and the seed germinated but stopped growing after the rain stopped.  

   

This important work of Farmers Helping Farmers is made possible with funding from Global Affairs Canada through the Gender Responsive One Health Project with Alinea International