Key people: Pastor Nepo, Juvenal, Ezechiel
In 2017 two of Bright Hope World's Foundations for Farming team came to Rwanda and trained around 20 people from the church group Inkurunziza. They have around 176 churches in the group. Many of the churches are in rural areas where up to 98% of people are subsistence farming. They have a vision to empower the local people to better their farming techniques and increase incomes to enable a more sustainable life and to help support the church work more.
In 2018 some funds were given to empower another training by Pastor Nepo who lives in eastern Rwanda. From the US$1,400 he managed to train 12 families who have been following the new techniques ever since. He says they have seen great benefit to the crop yields from mulching especially. There is no actual data to back this up, however. Apparently, the neighbours of the farmers have started to follow the techniques with great results as well.
Currently most churches in Rwanda have been closed by the Government. They have to show that they are run by qualified pastors with degrees, have adequate facilities such as the number of bathrooms for the congregation, fire measures, a certain standard of building and other requirements that most churches cannot meet.
While in Rwanda I met up with Juvenal who is the leader of the group and also called Pastor Nepo as he was 6 hours' drive away and couldn’t come to meet us. They said that they are still wanting to empower rural local people with farming training.
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I was also introduced to Ezechiel who is a young single man with a passion for agriculture. He grew up in eastern Rwanda and his family was always farming bananas, coffee, maize, beans, vegetables and peas. After finishing school with good results, the church group helped to fund him into a university in eastern Rwanda to study modern agriculture. He completed that in 2018, and now has his own piece of land where he grows bananas, plantain and coffee. From the plantain alone he hopes to earn US$291 per year. He also has volunteer work for the local government collecting data about agriculture in his province. The data consists of crops grown, areas, yields and profits.
Juvenal visited Ezechiel’s local church in 2022 and discussed with him “ok so now you have this knowledge and training how can you help your church?”. Ezechiel replied, “ah nothing!”. A discussion then ensued where they talked about the vision to empower people in the church with modern agriculture. (Pastor Juvenal is on the left, Ezechiel on the right)
In February 2024 Ezechiel started the first training courses. He trained 20–30 people at a time for three-day courses over a month. Now he has trained a total of 90 people and has been visiting their farms to follow up. The difference between traditional versus modern agriculture revolved around proper measurements, planting at the right season, conservation methods and mulching. Also, use of machinery such as tractors. He ran the courses with very little funds, which he says was difficult as the local people are very uneducated.
His vision for the future is to carry on training many people in the churches, and to introduce livestock programmes so they can easily access manure for compost and fertilizer replacement. The cost of fertilizer has gone very high.
We discussed the following:
• Ezechiel is to contact Pastor Nepo to try and get a better report on how the training of the 12 went, with the impact.
• A copy of the Foundations for Farming videos and literature was given to Ezechiel to go through and come back with any questions he might have.
• They are going to put some ideas down as to their vision and a strategy of how they will meet that vision.
• Next time I am in Rwanda I will plan to travel east to where they are to visit and see what is happening.
The vision for farming training remains. However, although Pastor Nepo is a good farmer and has done some training, his capacity to partner with us and provide the level of follow up required is challenging. Ezechiel is a shy man, but this is the first time we have met him. He has a lot of skills, and it will be interesting to see how the communications progress over the next while.