It’s the end of 2023 and we look back to an eventful and fruitful year.
With continued support from our partners GEO and DLC as well as with donations collected via GoFundMe, we could improve our school garden. This brings us closer to our goal of being financially independent from international aid.
Improvements in 2023
To strengthen our income-generating activities, we invested in this improvements:
- Signage in the school garden for plants and paths to allow self-guiding and learning. Improvement of roads
- Signage to the school garden to allow easier access by car. We hope this will not only help visiting school classes but also increase the number of tourists.
- To help local businesses as well as us to sell self-made goods during school garden events, we bought a shelf to exhibit products.
- We also extended our playground. It now includes a slide and swing.
- Additionally, we installed two hammocks and built two benches for visitors and staff to relax at the school garden.
- We could also afford a new solar panel with a stronger battery. Now we can use electronic devices such as a mixer to make juice and also charge our laptop and beamer for presentations.
New sign, indicating the school garden | Improved paths
Slide on the playground | Shelf with local products for sale
Hammock for relaxed breaks
New wooden bench | Evrard’s wife preparing a juice with a mixer
New teachers
With the support of GEO, we have now two full-time employed teachers. Before, our staff was paid per day only when school kids were visiting the school garden. Now our teachers have a continuous income supporting their life and family. Also, we can build a strong, knowledgeable, and stable school garden team. With the permanent staff, our manager Evrard has more help to organize things such as events, shopping, constructions etc. This helps to build up the independence of the team to manage the school garden even when Evrard is not around.
Besides all this, we have continued with our environmental activities and planted trees with different groups and clubs.
We continue travelling to different schools in the countryside doing lessons on lemure awareness. That means we teach school classes about the importance and conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. The teachers get teaching material for further lesson on the subject.
We also did a training with the school garden team to learn about how to dry and conserve local fruits.
The Leo Club planting trees at the school garden |
Students of Lycee Mixte planting trees at their school
Kids collecting compost material | Parents and their kids discovering the tree nursery
School garden staff giving lesson about lemurs | Teacher receives material
Staff peeling manioc | Finished chips
The kids also enjoy board games, puzzles and books which were donated from Germany. We try to continuously expand our library to offer a diversity of material to the students. Books are hard to find in this part of Madagascar – which makes the library at our school garden very special for the kids.
Playing kids
Improvements in the garden
Our tree nursery has grown and we have now many different species like banana and corosol growing there.
We also grow maize to produce food for our livestock and fish. Duke Lemur Center donated flower seeds to us and helped us growing a beautiful flower field bringing more color and diversity in our garden.
Banana saplings ready to be planted | Shaded tree nursery | Maize field at the school garden | Flower field at the entrance of the garden
We will start the next year with many new plans such as the expansion of the number of huts (visit our current GoFundMe campaign to support this cause: https://gofund.me/c8de782f
Also, we want to further expand our playground and offer first aid training to our school garden staff.