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Support small farmers with the gift that keeps on giving, the nutritious, climate-resilient potato!
With this generous gift, you are giving families not only access to improved potato seed that will increase their crop yields year-on-year, you are also giving them the essential tools to permanently overcome poverty with training and support from Ireland’s leading potato experts. Just ask Tesfaye and Workinesh! Before accessing Vita’s potato programme, Tesfaye and Workinesh were struggling to make ends meet, rearing four children on just €300 a year from their traditional potato crop. This low income trapped the Tole family in poverty, with little or no ability to overcome their hardship.Receiving a potato starter kit with improved seed and expertise from world-leading agronomists changed all this for the Tole family. The kit enabled Tesfaye to grow better quality (and higher quantity!) potatoes and manage his land better. From this, the family’s potato yield increased from two tonnes of potatoes on his half hectare farm to 18 tonnes of superior quality potatoes. This vast improvement has seen the family’s farming income rise from €300 to €9,000 a year. Their children are all now in full-time education, with Workinesh and Tesfaye using this income to give back to their community and set up further small enterprises.
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Support women like Yordanos with the life-changing gift of clean and safe cooking
By purchasing this vital gift, you are giving one family in East Africa the gift of not just a fuel-efficient and safe cookstove but also the skills and training to build and maintain this fundamental life source. This gift has never been more important. You see, just like in Ireland, cooking in East Africa is a way of bringing families together to share a feast and break bread. However, the very act of preparing this feast is harmful to families and the environment. Traditional stoves emit toxic fumes that cause respiratory disease and eye illnesses, they are inefficient and unstable, posing huge risk of burns and injuries and increasing cooking times. They also demand a huge amount of firewood that results in deforestation in already-arid communities and keep women and children in poverty by forcing them into hours of drudgery fetching and carrying heavy loads of fuel.
With this purchase, you have put the ‘celebration’ back into Yordanos’ feasts and her home. This improved stove is life-changing for many reasons: the enclosed flame and chimney prevent indoor air pollution, its height prevents burn injuries among small children, it protects the environment by saving trees from being cut down and it reduces fuel consumption by 60%, meaning women like Yordanos and her children no longer have to spend hours collecting heavy loads of firewood. It is little wonder this stove is known as ‘Adhanet’ in Eritrea, meaning saviour.