Children in the midst of climate change

With the increasing effects of climate change globally, there has been actions being taken to tackle it. As this takes place, there has been silent suffering among children who bear much brunt of these effects of climate change. These risks are:

• Insufficient supply of water. This puts them in the risk of spending long hours looking for water and sometimes having to spend the nights out looking for water.
• High chances of children being married off. As the effects of climate check in coupled with Covid 19, parents have had their sources of income being cut thus finding it hard extremely hard to cater for all their children. This is forcing some of them to marry off their girls to receive some money as bride price and cut on the mouths to feed.
• Children highly likely to miss school. As income sources for their parents dwindle, it becomes hard for them to keep their children in school.
• Unavailability of food. Climate change has impacted so negatively on agricultural production. This resulted in reduced food output for families, thus hunger in some families is negatively affecting children.
• Health risks. There are health risks affecting children these are hygienic, hunger related and psychological these have been as a result of the negative effects of climate change.

Being a teacher, I have been working with such children and taught them that these problems are as a result of climate change. We are therefore working towards reversing these effects. We are doing this through;

• Teaching the children on climate change
• Planting trees in nursery beds and distributing them to the community
• Making collaborations with other likeminded people to fight climate change

Children preparing a tree nursery bed at school

We need you on board to help reduce the risks and help these children and a future they are dreaming of.

Contact us through:

Email: vforganization2010@gmail.com

WhatsApp: +254 704159463

Moving forward

After our first FundRazr campaign we raised over $300, and began to successfully plant 6,300 trees, but we realised that we still had a huge deficit from our target of 2 million. The money just wasn’t coming in, with so many causes, so many needs, hunger, floods, fires, but we still held on to our original target, to plant more trees, as many as we could.

It has been through the unwavering support and dedication of a stalwarts, especially from Ms. Annemiek Van Moorst and Ms. Judith Lewsis, both of whom have been pillars, who enabled us plant our target 6,300 trees. We still need to plant more. We are planting different types of trees; woody trees for firewood, fruit trees, herb trees and ornamental trees. All of these will play different roles in our local ecosystem, for our communit and, collectively, helping in reducing carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere.

We therefore ask for your support, our visitors, friends and supporters, in purchasing more tree seeds and seedlings, to set up tree nursery beds. As we do this will be creating a good and more inhabitable environment for the future generations and leaving our mark as caretakers of the earth.

Thank you so much for any kind support you can offer, however small.

And please share! Kindness is also a seed, it needs scattering far and wide!

Eliud Omutanyi

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Who are we?

by Eliud Omutanyi, VFO’s chair

Our journey started in 2010, and it began quite simply by the realisation that resilience goes hand in-hand with self-sufficiency, self-reliance and environmental sustainability. These emerged for our community as the necessary tools to ensure food, as well as environmental security and we set out then to gather the necessary information to build ourselves a full toolkit.

Putting food on the table every evening has been my greatest pride since then. Though there’s still a long way to go, the ball is already rolling.

On my birthday I invited others from all over the world to join me in seeing that more trees are planted, more food is grown and, in short, an agroforestry project is launched to marry the needs of our ecosystem with those of our people.

This is what I call the balancing act and healing of mother earth.

Join me?

Eliud Omutanyi