Month: January 2025

Hands-On Outreach

The Hope of a New Business

In Dédougou, trainings in market gardening inspired women to work together to earn extra income by producing and selling tomato paste made from the produce from their gardens. Madame Traoré, a pastor’s wife, learned about tomato paste and above-ground gardening and is helping her family and neighbors improve their nutrition.

Today, she trains women in her community and sells her tomato paste throughout the western region of Burkina Faso. She also shares the gospel to those she trains. Her income has increased, and she is happy to contribute to the development of women.

Life-changing Trainings

Terrorism, extreme weather, poverty, and historically poor land management leave West African farmers at a constant disadvantage.

However, in the midst of these trials, hope is shining through!

ECHO West Africa training teams have equipped over 3,392 men and women with practical agricultural skills that they can implement immediately to greatly improve harvests.

Internally displaced people groups, living in temporary camps and in desperate need, are being equipped with gardening skills to grow food in small spaces.

From Failing to Successful Gardens 

ECHO recently partnered with a local NGO to provide 10-day trainings for 564 people. These trainings in market gardening techniques and entrepreneurship are helping families improve their gardening production and boost their incomes.

Abigaelle Kini was one of the women trained. She and her husband have a small plot of land that they were farming, but they kept trying and failing, never quite knowing how to make it successful.

“After the training with ECHO, I learned how to make natural products to eradicate the worms from my garden,“ said Abigaelle. “My husband and I are teaching our children all that we have learned.”

Equipping to Multiply

ECHO‘s East Africa trainers connect with family farmers through community group and school trainings, radio broadcasts, agricultural fairs, and farmer field schools.

When borders closed due to COVID-19 restrictions, trainers took another look at communities within Arusha City and saw existing groups that would benefit from and multiply ECHO knowledge. Youth committees, savings cooperatives, women’s groups, and secondary schools learned about the nutrients available in perennial vegetables and the benefits of urban gardens.

“For me, this training has been an eye-opening experience. I am thankful that the training has come just right in time when we need it most, “ shared Mama Abdul from Arusha. 

Creating Future Incomes

Appropriate technology and creative capacity building have equipped innovators to solve problems in their own villages leading to the creation of ongoing small businesses and custom, innovative farm implements.

Healthy Hillsides Support Healthy Crops

Tree seedlings and contour ditches in hillsides are investments in a healthy future! The team in East Africa has helped farmers cooperatively dig thousands of meters of erosion control contours and planted more than 24,000 indigenous seedlings to conserve precious hillsides. These hills are at risk of severe erosion leading to decreased soil nutrients and agricultural loss.

The team in East Africa has helped farmers cooperatively dig thousands of meters of erosion control contours and planted more than 24,000 indigenous seedlings to conserve precious hillsides. These hills are at risk of severe erosion leading to decreased soil nutrients and agricultural loss.

Simple Solution, Life-Changing Result

While Thailand is a peaceful country, neighboring regions have been challenged by civil war and violence. Internally displaced people live in long-term camps without access to many basic sanitation options. The ECHO Asia team realized that one of the most effective ways they could serve those struggling with contaminated drinking water was to teach and multiply the knowledge of simple biosand water filters.

Still limited by COVID protocols, the ECHO Asia team conducted a workshop that taught the principles and practices that participants would need to know to build their own 300-liter affordable biosand water filters. Again, the technology is the mechanism, but the real impact is evident in the lives of the people. Shortly after the training concluded, ECHO Asia trainers received an email with a simple message: “You trained us well and now we are blessing many people near the Myanmar border!”

One man, trained at ECHO’s small farm resource center in Chiang Mai, returned home and gathered men from his village. Together they constructed a 300-liter water filtration system from locally available resources and installed it in a few days. Through their work, a brand-new biosand water filter is providing clean water to a rural village in northern Thailand for villagers and refugees alike. 

This is the power of the ECHO effect. Your support helps to multiply one training into many other trainings — through those we train sharing what they learned — and many people benefit.

Seed Saving: Not Just a Tradition

By: Makenzi Johnson

In 1981, Dr. Martin Price saw that there was a lack of access to seeds of underutilized tropical food plants, a need that was already felt all over the world by small-scale farmers. To meet this need, the first ECHO Seed Bank was born. Forty years later, providing seeds of underutilized and neglected crops to small-scale farmers, development workers, and missionaries has remained one of ECHO’s main priorities.

What started as a humble collection of seeds on ECHO’s campus in Florida, has grown into a worldwide source of impact.

The first intern Dr. Price selected after he arrived at ECHO was Elise Hansen Tripp. She shared the bottom floor of an A-frame house with an office and a start at a collection of relevant books. Seeds that were little known at the time were collected and grown on the original five-acre property. Dr. Price, his wife Bonnie, and Tripp started storing seeds in Tripp’s refrigerator, which was the first Seed Bank. Only the three of them were there to sort and store the first varieties of seed by hand, but they made it work.

“I remember harvesting the seeds and putting them into envelopes,” Tripp said. “We talked about how to store seeds well, and that ‘we’re going to need some seed storage in the future.’”

In the late 1990s, the Seed Bank was growing to be too large for the refrigerator in the A-frame. A donation made it possible for ECHO to receive a larger capacity refrigerated storage container to properly house the seeds.

A climate-controlled area is one of the factors in storage that help best preserve the thousands of seeds ECHO holds. Other factors include pest control, appropriate containers, and annual germination testing. ECHO’s storage facilities are kept at 45 degrees Fahrenheit with 45% humidity, airtight containers are used for the storage of seeds, and germination testing is done annually to determine if a specific batch of seeds is still able to be used and sent out.

In 2002, ECHO purchased a neighboring property and acquired the garage that has now become the Seed Bank. The storage container was attached to the garage, making space for seed packaging and offices.

Forty years from the first Seed Bank, staff and volunteers are still sorting seeds by hand to carefully preserve, package, and send them out throughout the world. A large walk-in refrigerator, a processing and packing room, and more office space allow for ECHO to do more with seed banking training, dozens of volunteer sorters, and germination testing.

ECHO now also has regional seed banks which act as genetic banks for many varieties of underutilized seeds, depending on what seeds are appropriate for the geographical area. Each year, development workers can request ten packets of seeds for free. The ten packets help farmers test out the various crops, and those seeds bring substantial change.

“People have received one seed packet of moringa with just ten seeds, and that crop spreads throughout the community just from the one seed packet… it’s a small thing that has a huge impact,” Holly Sobetski, ECHO’s Florida Seed Bank manager, said.

Seed saving is taught so farmers can store their own seeds while being able to control pests and increase the viability of their seeds for future planting seasons.

“We want them to be self-sufficient and sustainable,” Sobetski said, “as much as we can teach people how to do this on their own, it’s going to help them.”

ECHO seed banks have been around for 40 years and have grown to meet the needs of those it serves. Across cultures and continents, the mission and goal of the seed banks have remained the same — to preserve seeds of underutilized crops for the benefit of small-scale farmers.

With improved seed saving, a farmer can improve their health and nutrition, increase their profit at the market, and ultimately increase their livelihood for years to come.