Rwanda

Small Seeds, Lasting Change: Food Security in Rwanda

aheckman — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:50:06 +0000

Small Seeds, Lasting Change: Food Security in Rwanda aheckman Thu, 05/28/2026 - 18:50

Small Seeds, Lasting Change: Food Security in Rwanda

May 28, 2026 ~ Amy Heckman

In Rwanda, a church-led food security project is empowering 700 vulnerable families, helping them grow fruits and vegetables and raise small livestock. These farming activities have a major impact, improving malnutrition rates and giving families options for earning additional income.

Local Nazarene churches have served as the main point of community engagement. Churches helped spread the word about the project and encouraged their members to participate. Pastors and church leaders helped select project participants, and faith is woven into the project’s activities, reinforcing the church’s role in holistic care and spiritual guidance.

The families chosen for the project come from communities where poverty is common. Many are involved who lack housing and job stability. Some can afford basic shelter, but the cost of buying enough food is prohibitive. This focusing on families with documented needs ensured the project would have the greatest impact.

Mukashyaka, a 39-year-old mother, and her four children were invited to participate in the project. Life was not easy for their family. In Mukashyaka’s village, she had little space to grow food, and the soil was tired, depleted of nutrients and not ideal for planting. She wasn’t growing enough to feed her children, and they began to show signs of malnutrition and slowed growth.

“I felt helpless,” she remembered. “As a mother, not being able to feed your children is the greatest pain.”

Things began to change when a neighbor invited her to attend a project training class at their local Nazarene church. She was hesitant, but decided to attend.

Mukashyaka and other participants were invited to join not just one, but a series of holistic training sessions.

They attended nutrition education workshops, raising awareness about the importance of including fruits and vegetables in their diets. From topics like how nutrition impacts overall health to learning how to prepare balanced meals with locally available produce, families were empowered to make changes with lifelong benefits.

Project leaders set up additional sessions facilitated by a local pastor who also serves as an agronomist (an expert in soil management and crop production). Mukashyaka learned about irrigation, pest management, crop rotation cycles, the nutrients different crops require, ideal planting calendars, and other helpful topics.

“I realized that even a small [plot of] land can feed a family if used wisely,” she said.

Distributions of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides set all 700 households up for farming success. Some families received large watering cans to make it easier to nurture their new fruits and vegetables.

The project leaders divided the participants into groups of 25 and gave each group five pigs. The group's members are jointly responsible for the pigs’ health and care. When piglets are born, they are divided among the group members. Over time, this ensures that every family ends up with their own livestock to continue raising. The pigs are insured so that, should injury or illness occur, an animal can be replaced without cost to the families. Animal husbandry techniques are taught to all groups.

When Mukashyaka received a pig, it boosted her family’s chances for future success. Today, home tells a different story than a few months ago.

Behind her house, a vibrant kitchen garden is flourishing. Rows of vegetables grow strong and green in her garden, nourished by organic manure from their pig. What was once barren land now produces enough to feed her family daily.

“My children now eat vegetables every day,” she said with a smile. “Their health has improved, and I can see the difference.”

The impact goes beyond food. When her pig gave birth, she shared the offspring with a neighbor, continuing a cycle of generosity and community support. The remaining pigs have become a source of income, bringing financial stability to her household.

With this progress, Mukashyaka now dreams bigger. She plans to pay her children’s school fees without struggle and hopes that within a year, her family will move into a modern, improved home.

Standing proudly in her garden, she reflected on her journey from a mother burdened by hunger and worry to a woman empowered with knowledge, resources, and hope.

“I thank God and the donors who made this possible,” she said. “My prayer is that this program reaches every family in our village.”

Mukashyaka’s story is a powerful reminder that even in the most challenging environments, knowledge, opportunity, and determination—and the partnership of local churches focused on blessing their communities—can plant the seeds of lasting change.

Rwanda

Food Security

Africa

Growing Bananas, Lifting Burdens

aheckman — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 16:11:24 +0000

Growing Bananas, Lifting Burdens aheckman Thu, 09/15/2022 - 16:11

Growing Bananas, Lifting Burdens

What does a banana have to do with economic security, education, and skill development? In Rwanda, the answer is everything.

There, Nazarene churches discovered that by training smallholder farmers to grow and sell high-quality bananas, they could create paths for security and change for individuals, families, and entire communities. These bananas fetch a high price at the market because they are highly nutritious and few farmers in the area grow the fruit.

At Mbare Church of the Nazarene, one of the participating churches, project leaders explained that this idea came about specifically to address burdens that church and community members carried on a daily basis. Lack of funds to pay for school fees, medicine, insurance, clothes, and even food made life stressful. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated stay-at-home requirements shuttered options for income even further.

The project’s concept, while simple, has had a meaningful impact. The project leaders identified people and families in need of assistance, and trained those beneficiaries in modern cultivation techniques. They provided them with banana tree seedlings to plant at home, and instructions related to fertilization, watering, timing of planting and harvesting, and how to achieve high crop yields in small plots of land, among other related topics. More bananas are planted on land provided by local churches. When the connected farmers sell their crop, they can then provide for their needs and the needs of their family members.

The local churches and church members involved in this project provided essential support like land, project management skills, follow up with participating growers to ensure their needs are being met, and help coordinating with required government reporting. This year, the project had 150 families participating, impacting around 600 beneficiaries directly.

One of the coordinators explains that the structure of the project can be broken down into three steps.

“There are three main activities which we are carrying out to make this project happen—The identification of beneficiaries (in collaboration with local authorities and the local church), the training of beneficiaries so the knowledge they gain can be implemented in their respective communities, and the home visits so that we may make sure that the knowledge is being implemented at the local level.”

The farmers who attended the trainings take their education home to improve their own skills. Mukamna is a beneficiary who received training in fertilizer use and how to best plant her seeds for optimal growth, not mixing varieties together. When the team leaders visited to check on her crops’ progress, they found them to be well-organized. Mukamna shared that this education was very helpful.

Other farmers go a step further, using their training to help others. Migabo, another beneficiary, also learned about fertilizer use, single crop cultivation, good seed selection, and monitoring activities. Migabo has now started educating other farming groups and is working to form a rice-growing organization.

“This project has been of great benefit because we’ve gained a knowledge of how the bananas are planted,” says another beneficiary. “We bring this knowledge to our local communities where we try to implement the same knowledge at the local levels.”

Over time, the project aims to help reduce the overall cost of bananas in the area so as to better support the community and the nutritional needs of children and those with poor health. In the coming years, the project will expand to more areas in Rwanda.

One farmer shared how participation in the project helped insure her children could attend school. “This project helped me a lot because I gained funds from this project and I bought animals to keep at home,” she says. “I have chickens, and I sell the eggs. After selling the eggs I pay the school fees for my children.”

From initial concept to now changing the lives of 600 people, this banana-growing effort is breaking the cycle of poverty and providing new options for income generation for farmers, while solidifying local churches as hubs of compassion and care. As a farmer states simply, “If we have problems, we ask this organization to help, and they help. For real, this project helps us prepare for the future.”

Rwanda

Small Seeds, Lasting Change: Food Security in Rwanda

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