Farmpreneur

Learning and growing through a School Nutrition Garden.

Poor nutrition impedes learning. Farmpreneur project mentors students to set up a School Nutrition Garden. Nutrition education facilitates adoption of healthy diet behaviour. Garden is used as an open science and mathematics laboratory to achieve improved learning outcome through an Activity Based Learning approach. The project provides exposure to the young learners towards Farm Entrepreneurship.

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HundrED 2024

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Overview

HundrED has selected this innovation to

HundrED Global Collection 2024

Web presence

2012

Established

90K

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Students lower

Updated

June 2023

More local resources being used to improve the learning outcomes for students across the globe. More local and indigenous food is incorporated into school meal programs for improved health of students.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

Learning outcomes of students in rural school are extremely poor. Due to poor infrastructures, inefficient pedagogy and inadequate nutrition leading to poor health, student are not able to perform well in schools. This is one of the reason for the high dropout rates among student. Out of 1.4 million schools India has 1.2 million schools located in rural areas catering to children from rural areas.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

Our Farmpreneur curriculum has 3 strands that are interwoven together in 15 chapters based on Agroecology principles.
a) Nutrition; Young people are encouraged to grow their own food by setting up a School Nutrition Garden. The experiential nutrition curriculum helps them build their understanding of nutrition. The experience helps students to adopt more local leafy vegetables and fruits into their diets.
b) Science and Mathematics education; School Nutrition Garden activities have been mapped with the science and mathematics syllabus of the state board. Through Activity-Based Learning approach, the garden becomes an open science and mathematics laboratory.
c) Entrepreneurship education; students get a first hand experience of live projects based on agriculture using local resources.
We have been working with the State Government schools in rural areas. It has improved diet behaviours, brought back local vegetables, and enhanced the academic performances of students.

How has it been spreading?

We have worked with more than 900 schools in India.
More than 60% of participants have improved diet behaviour.
More than 50% of participants have performed better in their academic subjects in schools.
There has been increased classroom participation of students due to innovative methods of teaching subjects like science and mathematics.
Increased participation of guardians in school affairs.
In 2019, Ministry of Education, Govt. of India adopted the program for 1.2 million schools.
In the next 3 years, we would like to focus on 2 areas;
a) Inspire and train schools/ CSOs to run the project in their regions
b) we would like to include many more aspect of farming and agroecology into the school space to create more learning platform for children in rural India.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

It is very easy to implement the program in any region. We have developed the basic framework for the Farmpreneur project. Anybody can easily contextualise the curriculum with our guidance plus their local community's participation. We can be reached at farm2food@gmail.com or deepjyotisonu@gmail.com.

Impact & scalability

HundrED Academy Reviews

This project creates an enormous positive impact on its students, teaching them a variety of skills including nutrition, agricultural skills, mathematics in relation to agriculture, biology, and most importantly, how to benefit from these skills.

This innovation is scalable in different context including emergencies where learners are thought to farm to increase their knowledge which then translates to improving their economic dependence and not engaging in negative coping mechanisms.

- Academy member

Academy review results

High Impact
Low Scalability

High Impact
High Scalability

Low Impact
Low Scalability

Low Impact
High Scalability

Media

Farmpreneur project being run in various Government schools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LyQMQFLNSA&t=5s

Implementation steps

Dialoguing

First step is to have a dialogue with school authority, guardians and students.
Do a basic health survey on anthropomorphic, anemic level and diet behaviour.
Plan and develop the curriculum using the Farmpreneur framework. Apart from building agreement, this step actually helps community, students dream. Dream about nutrition security, Dream about academic successes and dream about agri entrepreneurship as a viable career choice.

Developing plan of action

Farmpreneur curriculum has detail step by step processes to set up, manage and harvest a school nutrition garden.
Share the survey results with students and schools. Encourage them to set up school nutrition garden. Chapters on health and nutrition from science textbook could be used extensively for the conversation.

Community engagement

Organise seed donation drive to collect local seeds and saplings of vegetables, herbs and fruit trees.
Organise community labour donation day. Encourage guardians to help set up the school nutrition garden.
Plan the garden according to the Farmpreneur curriculum. Create learning opportunities in each and every steps of the project. Bio intensive raised beds for vegetables can cover topics like soil, micro organisms, geometric shapes, measurements etc.

Maintenance of the garden

During this period use the school Nutrition garden as an open science and mathematics laboratory. Use local indigenous knowledge of soil management, pest management and crop managements. Farmpreneur curriculum has detail instructions on organic and natural crop management techniques. Each chapter of Farmpreneur also brings in concepts, theories and elements from the schools science and mathematics textbooks.

Harvesting

This is a very important step, use Farmpreneur curriculum. Involve the students in harvesting the vegetables, herbs and fruits. They can prepare nutrition map of the supplied products. Prepare the school meals using the products from the garden.

Celebration

Invite guardians for a meal at school. Use the opportunity to celebrate the hard work put in by students and the partnership with school and community. Ask them to display their science, mathematics and nutrition learnings from the project. This enhances the confidence of young people. After harvesting encourage students to create a seed library in the school.
Through the project display discuss agroecology principles with the community. Each student here becomes a community change maker.