The Kamburu community in central Kenya is home to around 80 families. Like many in Kenya, they make a living from tea, a cash crop introduced to the area some 50 years ago. In recent years, the price of tea has dropped dramatically and the market flooded, resulting in tea companies no longer purchasing tea from the communities.

As income became less reliable, families like Kago and Rosemary struggled to pay for education and health whilst retaining enough income to buy food. The quality of life for the people of Kamburu was far from what had been promised by the tea companies.

Two years ago, when the people of Kamburu were suffering from hunger due to drought, Gathuru Mburu decided to change the fortunes of his community. With the help of The Gaia Foundation and the African Biodiversity Network, Mburu formed the Institute for Culture and Ecology (ICE), which now works with communities across central Kenya.

With the support of The Institute for Culture & Ecology, the community revived indigenous, ecological farming methods, and saw a transformation in the soil, the livelihoods and the confidence of the Kamburu community.

Dialogues took place with local elders; the knowledge holders of the community. Through ongoing discussions with both men and women, the community began to recover and cultivate the lost indigenous seeds of the region.

ICE supported an intense programme with the communities to revive their traditional seed diversity and associated knowledge, and to enhance regenerative agricultural practices, such as rain harvesting and organic compost production.

The community were taught how to collect, clean and use their livestocks manure to create ideal natural fertilser for their crops rather than using pesticides and artificial fertilisers.

The organic farming methods re-learnt by the community allowed them to move away from expensive and polluting chemical fertilizers. The benefits witnessed by the community have been huge. Indigenous crops are diverse and rich in nutrients and natural sources of vitamins, so health has improved.

Farmers have revived diverse varieties of plants and seed which are more naturally suited to the local weather conditions and landscape. Their local adaptation enables them to better withstand the droughts common to many parts of the continent, and likely to become more widespread with climate change.

Today the community are not only food secure, but also have sufficient surplus to take to market and share with surrounding communities. They are so impassioned by their journey that they are actively sharing their learnings with neighbours, making the programme self-perpetuating and empowering communities to build their food sovereignty as well as their resilience to climate change.

The ecological knowledge required was already inherent in the community, they simply needed the encouragement and support to remember it, revive it, and value it once again.