Who We Are
Abalimi Bezekhaya is a Voluntary Association, established in 1982 and formally constituted in 2002, led by a Management Board.
A group of sixteen staff and volunteers work to provide support to the farmers on the ground through training, affordable and accessible resources, infrastructure support, access to the market, and organization building.
What We Do
Abalimi’s work can be best described by looking at our core business and target areas.
Our aim is to, firstly, combat poverty by growing food sustainably, using organic methods, at home and in community gardens and, secondly to provide support to the farmers in production planning, soil infrastructure, planning harvests, access to seeds and seedlings, vegetable transportation, and financial services to be able to run their micro farms.
Our core business is based on the following four pillars:
– providing training and extension services to small-scale farmers
–Â providing access to affordable seeds, seedlings, and manure for production
– provide support around capital infrastructure, such as irrigation and manure for soil building, depending on available funding
– provide access to the market to allow farmers to sell surplus vegetables
– provide organization building and administrative support
Our core business is implemented in the following manner:
The garden centers provide a direct point of contact for the community where they can buy supplies and get support to encourage resilience.
Food security is a strong focus throughout our organization, starting from a container garden at home
The production gardens have a stronger focus on income generation and job creation.
The administrative team helps to pull this all together behind the scenes.
Our target group is living in vast informal settlements, often referred to as townships of Cape Town, where over a million people live, mostly in shacks and matchbox houses. Approximately 40% of its people are unemployed. The majority speak isiXhosa and are migrants from the Eastern Cape – the former apartheid homelands of Transkei and Ciskei.
Our target area is the Cape Flats – including Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Philippi, Browns Farm, Crossroads, and Gugulethu. The Cape Flats is an ecologically sensitive dune sand area that contains some of the most threatened floral species within the unique Cape Floral Kingdom, a World Heritage Biome. The sandy soil makes it difficult for growing vegetables, thus we strive through all our activities and projects to conserve and enhance the soil and natural vegetation.
Our vision is to support individuals and groups from disadvantaged communities in Cape Town to recognize the link between their survival, health, and the active improvement of their environment so that they have the confidence to initiate, replicate and sustain food growing and greening activities. These actions furthermore act as an entry point to other development activities that can improve lives. By forming grassroots associations and networks they will actively seek out and lobby for resources and support, which will strengthen their self-help initiatives in both their rural and urban homes.
Our mission statement is to empower the disadvantaged through urban agriculture and environmental programs and projects. We support our target group’s ability to replicate their success and transform their lives in their urban and rural environments.
Abalimi assists by providing the following support services:
– Project implementation
– Agricultural and horticultural commodities
– Training
– Organisation building
– Facilitation of partnerships
– Research, monitoring, and evaluation
