Featured Image: Kenneth training the school children on Agribusiness and also activating them to become active citizens (SDGs)
My name is Okonkwo Kenneth Chukwuebuka, I am an Agribusiness consultant, STEM-ed Africa Ambassador, YALI Network member, TEDx Johannesburg fellow, and an SDGs knowledge Facilitator. I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Agricultural Technology from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri.
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others”. This quote from Martin Luther King has been a driving force for me to develop, innovate, and implement ideas, projects or programs that tend to respond to humanity’s most pressing challenges as defined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As a Sustainable Development Goals advocate, I had a passion to see hunger and poverty (Goals #1 and #2) being eradicated to the minimum in Nigerian rural communities. This inspired me to start a rural youth farming association in my community (Apeka rural community in Ikorodu, Lagos state) in 2018 where Children, Youths, and Women were trained on Sustainable Agricultural Practices, Climate / City Smart Agriculture and Agribusiness as a means to alleviate poverty, fight hunger, create employment opportunities and systematically protect the ozone layer from depletion. The positive impact of the project tripled down to other communities and as a result, food insecurity, social vices, and malnutrition were reduced in the communities. This was recognized and highlighted by YALI on world food day.
Furthermore, in order to prepare the future generation to become sustainable food producers and active citizens that will combat hunger and poverty, I started a project in 2019 called Eco-friendly school farm project. This project is aimed to provide school-aged children hands-on field co-creation learning on environmentally friendly and innovative agricultural practices that would directly improve their nutrition and equip them with requisite sustainable agropreneurial skills.
With the soaring rate of socio-economic challenges faced by smallholder farmers, children of school age are usually the most disadvantaged in the household. These children are faced with malnutrition and are usually unable to participate fully in school as a result of this and thus perform marginally in their academics. In spite of being raised in agrarian communities of Lagos State and having the benefit of education, children of smallholder farmers have shown to contribute very little by way of innovation to the traditional farming practices. The education the children receive in school neither prepares them for highly skilled urban jobs nor improves their agricultural practices to become more successful farmers thereby propagating a cycle of poverty. Therefore, we’re equipping them with Eco-Friendly farming techniques to improve their nutrition, reduce waste and also provide them with income (Waste 2 Wealth W2W).
After acquiring sponsorship from WorldConnect USA and ProtectOzone, Lagos, Nigeria and also permission from Lagos state Ministry of Education, I and my team embarked to implement the project in 4 public schools in Ikorodu, Lagos: (Odogunyan Senior High school, High School Ikorodu, Isawo High school and Government Model College Ikorodu). It will run for a period of 6months and the students will be trained on the following:
- Intensive Vegetable Farming.
- Reusing waste materials for food production.
- Agribusiness
- Smart City Agriculture.
- Water Saving Irrigation kit.
- Organic Fertilizer production.
- Organic Pesticides Production.
We hope to scale up the project after the first phase of the current one so as to ensure sustainability.
Do you want to share your SDGs Story with us? Send us an email and pictures of your work info@nigerianyouthsdgs.org
