“Feed the land, and it will feed you.”
—Josephine Kizza
St. Jude’s Family Projects
A family farm, organic integrated ecology center, agricultural training college, and extension program all in one
Meet the caregiver
Josephine Kizza is a busy woman. Her organization, St. Jude’s Family Projects, has been featured regularly in the news; has been visited and celebrated by Uganda’s President Museveni; and has partnered with numerous other organizations in shared initiatives and contracts. She has built a new campus for her own College of Agro-ecology; and she has started trainings with schools around the country on how to use their campus lands effectively to feed their poorest students. Every time we sit down, she tells me something new about an initiative she has started, an integrated farming method she is developing, or an area of ecology she is learning and teaching about. All this from a woman who, 30 years ago, had few possessions other than a 3.5-acre piece of land and two small pigs.
The background
Josephine and her husband John were internally displaced during the civil wars of the 1980s. While living in the capital of Kampala, they became concerned about John’s family in the southern town of Masaka, where some of the worst fighting between the government military and rebel forces was taking place. They decided to travel south to see them. Soon, though, their return was cut off by more fighting and their home in Kampala was ransacked. They had no choice but to make a new life in Masaka.
They were given the land and the pigs from a relative. Trained as a teacher, Josephine knew very little about farming. But she is a naturally curious and tenacious woman, who adopted her new profession with vigor. She was able to attend an organic integrated farming course offered by a woman from the United Kingdom, and soon found herself instructing her neighbors on better, less costly, and more efficient ways of gardening.
Feeding, tending, and caring
When her husband passed away in 2004, she was left to run the farm and raise their four children alone. This did not deter her: she continued to expand the project and offer trainings, primarily to the poorest female-headed households and youth in her community. She began to learn and share about the systemic problems faced by Uganda’s family farms, including irregular rains caused by climate change, imported fertilizers and pesticides, the loss of heirloom varieties of seeds, and inconsistent markets for cash crops like coffee. She also became an agricultural producer in her own right, supplying organic fruit and juice to both domestic markets and buyers in Germany and the United Kingdom.
Although St. Jude’s Family Farm receives some donor support, they rely even more on the sale of their products and the income they earn from their paid demonstrations. The sustainability of this model, as a productive farming business and now training college, allows her to serve her clients and develop new projects as she sees fit. It also allows her to maintain consistency with her students and clients, an important aspect of collective care.
Josephine is
a successful businesswoman, but her primary passion is to help others and be a guide for women in poverty. As she says:
A hero must never give up. A hero must encourage others not to give up, must continue encouraging others, and must live to see to it that everyone is successful, and live and cerebrate every one’s success. Those are the heroes that we want to see and think of.
To find out more and to contribute to the work of St. Jude’s, visit their website.