The End of Poverty

(6 of 11)

The meeting took place on the grounds of a school called the Bar Sauri Primary School, where headmistress Anne Marcelline Omolo shepherds hundreds of schoolchildren through primary education and the travails of daily life. Despite disease, orphanhood and hunger, all 33 of last year's eighth-grade class passed the Kenyan national secondary-school exams. On a Sunday last July, we saw why. On their "day off" from school, this year's class of eighth-graders sat at their desks from 6:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. preparing months in advance for this year's national examinations in November. Unfortunately, many who will pass the exams will be unable to take a position in a secondary school because of lack of money for tuition, uniforms and supplies. Nonetheless, to boost the fortitude of the eighth-graders during the critical examination year, the community provides them with a midday meal, cooked with wood and water the students bring from home. Alas, the community is currently unable to provide midday meals for the younger children, who must fend for themselves.

When our village meeting got under way, I canvassed the group and got very perceptive accounts of the grim situation. Only two of the 200 farmers at the meeting reported using fertilizer at present. Around 25% are using improved fallows with nitrogen-fixing trees, a scientific farming approach developed and introduced into Sauri by the World Agroforestry Center. With this novel technique, villagers grow trees that naturally return nitrogen to the soil by converting it from the atmosphere, thus dramatically improving yields. The new method could be used throughout the village if more money were available for planting the trees alongside their maize crops.

The rest of the community is farming on tiny plots, sometimes no more than one-quarter of an acre, with soils that are so depleted of nutrients and organic matter that even if the rains are good, the households still go hungry. If the rains fail, the households face the risk of death from severe undernutrition. Stunting, meaning low height for one's age, is widespread, a sign of pervasive and chronic undernutrition of the children.

The real shocker came with my follow-up question. How many farmers had used fertilizers in the past? Every hand in the room went up. Farmer after farmer described how the price of fertilizer was now out of reach, and how their current impoverishment left them unable to purchase what they had used in the past.

As the afternoon unfolded, the gravity of the community's predicament became more apparent. I asked how many households were home to one or more orphaned children left behind by the AIDS pandemic. Virtually every hand in the room shot up. I asked how many households were receiving remittances from family members living in Nairobi and other cities. The response was that the only things coming back from the cities were coffins and orphans, not remittances.