WINKER

When Hannah Wairimu 48, lost her husband in 2009, she thought the world had crumbled on her as she was left with the burden of feeding their four children and taking them to school. The family, living in Karwaya Village of Kandara district, had been dependant on coffee growing but due to poor marketing strategies of the crop, they incurred costs. Meanwhile her income was dwindling day by day thereby making it impossible to take care of her family. The widow invested in diversifying crops on her small farm, thanks to the Agricultural Technologies Information Response Initiative (ATIRI) programme introduced by Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). Wairimu now grows passion fruits, avocadoes, bananas, and strawberry for commercial purposes thereby earning her enough money to send her children to school feed them and take care of other needs. “Through this programme, I have managed to educate my four children. They had stopped schooling as I could no longer afford fees for them. T...

As human beings visit doctors when feeling unwell, that is the same way farmers are now taking their ‘sick’ plants to clinics for information and prescription. Plant clinics are modeled on the human health advice concept, where plant ‘doctors’ provide expert advice on pests and diseases affecting their crops and provide prescriptions for affected plants. The global plant clinic concept was developed in 2003 by the Centre for Agricultural Bio-Science International (CABI) in Bolivia then piloted in Bangladesh and Nicaragua. In Kenya CABI, jointly partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture’s extension services, Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate (KEPHIS) to initiate the project in October last year. Mr. Peter Karanja, a field technician at CABI says that under the programme, farmers take their affected crops to the plant clinics, normally held at public places like market centres where they are given recommendation by trained personnel referr...