Nabusanga Primary School
Since 2016, Day by De has had an ongoing relationship with Nabusanga Primary School in Kabwe, a few hours north of Lusaka. It began with the funding to construct a 1.5-acre vegetable garden to support the school’s 750 students and 30 teachers. The teachers, students and community of Nabusanga maintained this project so responsibly that, in 2019, Day by De funded a complementary chicken farm to pair with the school’s garden. Together, the garden and farm also create a sustainable system, with the chicken manure offsetting some of the need for expensive fertilizer in the garden.
We’re proud to report that over the past five years, the garden and farm have yielded enough to not only provide students free school lunches, but also to sell surplus produce and meat, providing supplemental funding for the school’s operations and maintenance. In fact, the project has been so successful that Zambia recently began requiring that all schools establish a garden or animal farm on their properties to provide similar benefits. Nabusanga has become a poster child for this new policy and serves as a role model for other schools nationwide.
In 2017, Day by De team members visited Nabusanga to formally hand over the ownership of the project to the school. This ceremony was featured on Zambia Prime TV News in the video below:
Nabusanga Primary School Handover Ceremony - June 2018. Coverage by Zambia Prime TV News.
“Yes, I will not be a beggar because I have learned to work with my own two hands. gone are the days when we used to starve. We, as a family, have a backyard garden from the knowledge I gained from you, our own day by de foundation. I share with my family and I have started contributing by using your gardening ideas and skills. These skills are very beneficial because they are life skills I will have to live and survive with as I grow up.”
Prior to the support of Day by De, many of the students at Nabusanga struggled to afford food, and the lunches they receive at school may be their only meal of the day. We have learned that school attendance noticeably increased after the garden and chicken farm were built, primarily attributed to the availability of these free, nutritious meals.
In 2021, we returned to Nabusanga to see how the project has developed and were extremely impressed to see that the school has continued to maintain the garden and chicken farm throughout the Covid pandemic. The garden is still going strong and has clearly been attentively cared for by the students and school staff. Their crops include tomatoes, spinach, carrots, onion, African eggplant, cabbage, Chinese cabbage, okra, beetroots, green pepper and maize.
Day by De has been so thrilled with this school’s efforts that we decided to fund an expansion to double the chicken house’s size in early-2022, thereby doubling the profits and benefits to the school. (Impressively, when Nabusanga constructed the existing chicken house in 2019, they already had the foresight and ambition to prepare the foundation for such an expansion.)
We look forward to sharing more updates from this community as our relationship continues!
