Help 2000 tribal families fight hunger in Rajasthan

The second wave of COVID 19 attacked India with unprecedented fury. While hundreds of thousands died, millions faced acute food shortages and hunger. The common refrain was "if COVID didn't kill them, hunger would". Women and children, especially girls were worst affected. The immediate and most urgent need is to provide and secure families with a means to achieve food security and thus fight the long-term effects of malnourishment.

iPartner India is implementing a project called ‘Rakshan’ in Rajasthan. Rakshan works on creating safe spaces for girls and women and aspires to create villages that are violence-free and where girls and women can exercise their agency to make their own choices. Like the whole of India, the villages in Rajasthan were also affected by COVID-19. One of the activities carried out in the villages where Rakshan is being implemented is to help families become self-sustainable. After the initial relief work, it was realised that micro-interventions like setting up a kitchen garden help families sustain during the pandemic and also in the future when livelihoods would be hit. The immediate and most urgent need is to provide families with a means to achieve food security and thus fight the long-term effects of malnourishment.

iPartner India is committed to empowering women to become self-reliant. The pandemic affected everyone but affected the incomes of poor families the most. Thousands went hungry during the first wave of the pandemic. As a solution, we trained women from 1,895 families to set up kitchen gardens. These could be easily maintained on a small patch of land with basic training. Women were able to produce organic vegetables which they used and sold the excess vegetables grown to achieve sustainability. Rakshan team has identified 2,040 families in the 27 intervention villages of Tonk, Rajasthan. iPartner India will provide training to these women to set up and maintain kitchen gardens and will also provide them with initial supplies/seeds etc.

The proposed project will set up kitchen gardens for 2,040 extremely poor and vulnerable families in the Tonk district of Rajasthan to help them keep hunger and malnutrition at bay during the pandemic. Women will be trained and empowered to manage these kitchen gardens. We have already trained 1,895 families with food security during the second deadly wave of the pandemic as it became clear that hunger could be more deadly than COVID. This concept has proved to be sustainable and has a high impact. Therefore, we propose to train additional women farmers from 2,040 families. The aim is also to make families self-reliant and live a life of dignity.

We envisage the Kitchen gardens concept having multiple long-term impacts on women and their families. 1) The first almost immeasurable impact is the prevention of hunger-related deaths and an increase in nutrition levels with the consumption of healthy and organic vegetables. 2) Women will have an alternate source of income from selling the surplus. 3) Financial inclusion training on Savings and setting up bank accounts and training on reinvestment of surplus funds would ensure long-term sustainability.