Lilian Kayes picks kales from her 'garden in a sack' in Nairobi's Kibera slum.
Urban hunger is a growing problem in Kenya due to rising food prices and high rates of unemployment. REUTERS
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Her bare feet coated with mud, Sabena Gitau trudged down the rain-sodden hillside to her banana plantation, machete in hand.
She chose and cut several giant bunches of bananas, which she strapped to a motorbike to be taken to nearby Saba Saba town, 77 km (48 miles) north of Nairobi, to be weighed, graded and sold.
A decade ago, Gitau made the same 10 km trip a couple of times a month, on foot with her bananas on her back, earning about 420 shillings ($5) for the dawn-to-dusk trek.
Today, after planting improved varieties and working as part of a cooperative to boost her access to markets, the 59-year-old grandmother earns 30,000 shillings ($360) a month from her bananas, selling them at 13 shillings a kilo rather than three.
“I am not educated. My father denied me that chance. But I've made something of my life,” said Gitau, who has bought seven dairy cows with some of her profits.
She also recently planted 100 passion fruit vines as part of an $11 million project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Coca Cola, to have 50,000 Kenyan and Ugandan smallholders produce fruit for Minute Maid juice and double their incomes in the process.
As the world looks for ways to boost food production by at least 70 percent by 2050 to feed an increasingly hungry planet, many people are looking to sub-Saharan Africa -- a region with 50 to 60 percent of the planet's unused arable land. read more: www.trust.org/alertnet/news/
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