Last year, one of the first grants Eliminate Poverty Now made was $2500 for Trees for Kids. This program was initiated by Robin Mednick of Pencils for Kids and Dov Pasternak, then of ICRISAT, in response to the famine in Niger. It provided training and supplies to young people to graft fruit trees in Niger. Their wages were paid by the farmers who own the trees. At $10/tree, our grant paid for 250 trees to be grafted.
Now we have photos of the results. It's wonderful to see the kids grafting the trees in the early photos, and eating the fruit later on. I highly recommend reading Robin's comments on the photos. To do that, you need to watch the slideshow in full screen (click the little icon on the bottom right) and then click "show info" on the upper right.
That's so cool! :)
ReplyDeleteThis is wonderful to see, and it leaves me feeling very surprised. My impression from this post is that little time passed from grafting to harvesting fruit, but I didn't know this was possible. Can you tell us whether the very same kids who did the grafting also did the harvesting, and how much time elapsed between the two? Very inspiring!
ReplyDeleteThe trees were grafted in the June and July, and bore fruit in November. Pretty amazing, right! Dov Pasternak suggested the jujubier tree because it would provide nutritious fruit quickly to fight the famine in Niger.
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