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How we work

Self Help Africa works at grassroots level tackling poverty and improving lives.

Our primary focus is on assisting families and communities to grow enough food to feed themselves and to earn a sustainable living.

We promote and support the implementation of simple and effective innovations to farming, managing natural resources, and helping people access basic services like clean water, healthcare and education.

Self Help Africa has almost twenty-five years experience in bringing lasting solutions to poverty for Africa’s rural poor.
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External links :

Triticale-Wikipedia
Enset-Wikipedia
Treadle pump-Wikipedia
Watershed management-Wikipedia
Vetiver-Wikipedia
Rainwater harvestingWikipedia
HIV/AIDS-Wikipedia
      
      
      
      

Practical solutions

Self Help has adopted and embraced a wide variety of innovative technologies to assist the people we work with to achieve sustainability in their lives.

The technologies and approaches are many and varied, and are devised as cost effective and practical ways of tackling the very real challenges faced by Africa's rural poor.

The solutions (listed right) are just a sample of some of the approaches being promoted by Self Help.

These include measures to increase on-farm productivity, to optimise the use of available water and resources, to support income generation, to rehabilitate the natural environment, and to reduce the amount of time and effort that poor people must expend to do the most basic tasks.

Almost without exception they are activities that rely on the active participation of the local people themselves, and in many instances are solutions being put forward by the people.

Self Help Africa believes that lasting, long term change will only come if the communities, or the individual farmers themselves, are involved at every turn in the development process.
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Technologies :
Area enclosures - Environmental rehabilitation
Beekeeping
Fuel efficient cooking stoves
Enset - 'the tree against famine'
Triticale - a valuable hybrid cereal
Extension farmers
Watershed - managing the water table
Fertility trenches -optimising production
HIV/AIDS - addressing the challenge
Jar irrigation - when water is scarce
Fish farming - an alternate enterprise
Harvesting rainwater
Harvesting rainwater - an alternative
Rope and washer pumps
Savings & credit - encouraging enterprise
Tied ridging
Treadle pumps
Animal traction - ox power
Research - building bridges from laboratory to farm
Vetiver grass - arresting erosion