In rural areas of Uganda, opportunities for economic engagement are nearly non-existent. Many families live in persistent poverty and struggle under countless extreme associated challenges. My garden project is a female youth led rural community based organization that was launched in 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic with an aim of providing training and equipment of women and adolescent girls with developmental empowerment skills basically in mushroom growing as to earn a small living (SDG1), Food for home consumption (SDG 2) and also good health and wellbeing (SDG 3).
Our mission is to leverage progress towards SDG1, SDG2, SDG3, SDG5 in rural communities through training and equipment of economic development skills and tools to adolescent girls and women.
Our Vision is to create a world in which all women determine the course of their lives and reach their full potential.
Our goal is ensuring every woman is trained and equipped with skills capable enough to provide self-determination in making own clear decision hence pushing to self-growth.
The main objective of this project is to train and equip women with mushroom growing skills at small and large scale at our already two set demonstration sites within the community and since most of rural women are housewives and stay home mothers they do not have any source of income, with this project we seek to expand and modernize mushroom cultivation as a means of enhancing women’s income and subsequently their overall wellbeing in society given majority of them being low income earners and also family heads. To achieve this, the project aims to not only train and teach them but also provide a bag of free oyster spawn/mushroom seeds to over 200 households. Oyster mushrooms are high in fiber, iron, zinc, potassium and other essential vitamins to a more advantage a bag of spawn yields 2-3 kilograms of mushroom a day quite enough for home consumption and also sales in order to acquire a small amounts of funds to run the home expenses. Mushroom cultivation also yields briquettes at the end of the harvesting where old gardens are decomposed to make clean cooking fuels in homes (SDG7) hence allowing households not to rely on firewood or kerosene lanterns which are environmentally unfriendly.
The project needs more funding currently due to the more demand of helping out more women and adolescent girls with trainings and also provision of free equipments as a startup, the project needs resources such as mushroom spawn, watering cans, steaming drums so as to increase the output production. The project currently survives on local volunteer aid, in kind donations and organization member fundraising with an extra financial support in the project we hope to impact many lives and also have mushroom gardens in every rural household at Mityana district and its neighbouring districts by 2030.