Help Rural Communities in their access to food

 "Through community seedling bank experiences, producers go by planting challenges together and with the accompaniment of territorial promoters and KOKUE mobile application"

 In Monteagudo town, province of Tucumán, members from ACDI’s team of agroecological promoters accompany family-scale producers in vulnerable situations in the challenges faced in the growth of their agroecological green gardens in adverse conditions such as the soil aridity that characterizes the area.

 Having detected in the area many cases of producers who could not advance in the planting stage of the process due to difficulties found on seedlings production, community workshops were designed and executed among local producers to work together in a prototype. This initiative favored the exchange of good practices among participants; the incorporation of the digital tool KOKUE (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.project.kokue), the strengthening of community bonds and the theoretical and practical learning of this stage of agroecological horticultural production.

In the first meetings the activities were oriented to the conformation of wooden boxes with soil of a high organic content in its composition, mainly topsoil (vegetal cover resulting from the total or partial decomposition of organic matter. Once they were ready, planting was carried out on them, working simultaneously in basic concepts of agroecology such as: types of planting, germination, types of vegetables, depth of planting, frequency of irrigation, etc. To achieve the appropriation of these contents and good agroecological practices, the promoters helped the team to download the Kokue mobile application on their phones and trained them on it uses and features since it has several strategies and information necessary to generate resilient gardens and monitor crops autonomously.

The group decided to keep the seedling boxes rotating from house to house so that each family would take responsibility for them and could put care strategies into practice. Another established good practice in this process was the donation of seedlings to the community bank. Each family in charge of the boxes could bring seedlings and practice their transplant in the boxes.

Miss Pupé, participant of the community seedling bank, shares with us: "honestly, this space is very important to me, to be able to share our knowledge with neighbors and receive the guidance of the promoters is wonderful. Together we achieve better results in the planting stage despite the difficult weather conditions. Also, now with the Kokué app we can continue learning and taking care of our crops."

Thanks to the growth and improvement of the green gardens accompanied by the promoters of ACDI, new families are also interested in joining the initiative as they see the good results obtained by their neighbors. Dreams and effort worth it a lot, and are multipliers of good practices and an inspiration for others!

 We invite you to download our KOKUE App (Spanish) to join this agroecological wave with your garden. Collaborate economically to help continue developing KOKUE, so that it can reach more countries and more small producers in vulnerable areas can achieve their food sovereignty and care for the environment.