Kenyan refugees use gardening to fight malnutrition but hunger lingers

KAKUMA, Kenya —  As the sun slides toward the deep west of northern Kenya, Asiyen Nawet chats with her fellow women as they water a garden of greens at Loitakul village.

The reason for their cheer is a garden that has been providing them with produce such as kale, spinach, pumpkin, and even the occasional banana and pigeon pea serving, amid a parched terrain straining from years of prolonged drought.

“I cook the vegetables and serve them along with a bowl of mashed flour or grains. My family says the meals are tastier compared to when there were no vegetables,” says the mother of nine.

Nawet is a refugee living in the Kakuma settlement in northern Kenya. But in the 30 years she has lived here, she has only known relief food supplies such as milled flour or hard cereals such as pulses and maize. Fruits and vegetables were never on the menu.

According to a brief by the International Water Management Institute, food supplied to refugees lacks dietary diversity — a situation that has led to acute malnutrition and anemia among settler communities.

A 2017 nutrition survey in the Kakuma refugee camp and neighboring Kalobeyei settlement found acute malnutrition levels of 10.6% and 5.9% respectively. Lack of access to micronutrients in diets in the camps remained a key concern, with anemia levels of above 50% among children aged 6 to 59 months.

But working with institutions such as the IWMI, World Agroforestry, and other partners, refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda are learning to garden, with the aim of improving their diets.

“The donors provide us with seed to grow in the gardens. The water we use to feed the crops is pumped from boreholes using solar energy,” says John Ejem, the supervisor of Loitakul village community gardens, which are locally called booster gardens because they are meant to supplement the community’s dietary needs.

Ejem says his group of 26 refugees also recycles water that has been used for cooking and other domestic needs to increase the productivity of the gardens instead of applying chemical fertilizers.

At Loitakul village, the gardens occupy about three-quarters of an acre, serving a community of about 2,500 refugees. But other villages in the wider refugee settlement have their own gardens too, Ejem said.

“The gardens are a game changer. With more support, I see potential to expand them to all refugee camps in Kenya,” says the 62-year-old father of nine.  

But Elizabeth Chegem, another refugee in Kakuma, says that though the gardens are helping families improve nutrition, the frequency of food rations to communities has also decreased.

Chegem says since the gardens were established in 2021, local authorities seem to have forgotten that refugee communities still need grain and flour food rations to supplement their diets. Adding that the last time relief food was brought to her village was about four months ago, a situation that has put pressure on the gardens as families scramble for the few available harvests.

“It is like our leaders thought we can now sustain ourselves. But how can you live on vegetables alone,” Chegem says.

In October 2021 the World Food Programme was forced to reduce general food rations to 440,000 refugees from 60% to 52% of the minimum food basket due to an increase in the number of refugees and inadequate funding.

During a visit to northern Kenya in mid-April this year, Craig Redmond, the senior vice president for programs at Mercy Corps, said that marginal communities troubled by the twin shocks of drought and climate change could be forgotten at this time when the world is focused on resolving the Ukraine crisis.

And that could mean more trouble for refugee communities relying on humanitarian food supplies.

“Our biggest fear was that money would be peeled off [from] other humanitarian operations and pivoted into Ukraine. That is what is kind of happening, but how will communities be resilient to shocks and stresses?” Redmond says.

To soften the blow of these shocks and stresses, refugee communities in Kenya are now turning to firewood sourcing and hawking, according to John Ewoi, another refugee.

Ewoi said the money fetched from hawking firewood is used to buy grain and flour, to ensure families continue with the cycle of supplementing their diets. But this is not sustainable as firewood is turning into a scarce resource.