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The CAMFED Garden: Giving Girls in Africa a Space to Grow - Video Transcript
Jilayne Rickards, Garden Designer I’m Jilayne Rickards and I’m a professional garden designer. Well it is so exciting! The Chelsea Flower Show is renowned as the top notch horticultural show within the entire world, so it’s a massive privilege to be showcasing CAMFED there.
Catherine Boyce, CAMFED, Director of Enterprise Development As the Campaign for Female Education we work with rural communities in some of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa to help disadvantaged girls to go to school and to succeed at school. As they complete school, we support young women to create businesses that help them to generate an income and to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Agriculture is a major growth sector for young women’s enterprise.
Jilayne Rickards, Garden Designer So when I went to Zimbabwe early this year, one of the many people that I met was a lady called Beauty, who is an agricultural entrepreneur and runs her own farming business in Zimbabwe, and she’s been massively influential on this garden. So I’ve hit on the idea of using the classroom setting to obviously focus people on the educational part, but actually the rest of the planting is given over to horticultural crops. Things which Beauty might well be growing.
So for instance, the bio-fortified beans, which she grows there, are going to be featured in the garden. The planting is going to be big and bold and exuberant and really powerful. I really wanted to get a punch of color in there too. So I’ve got some wonderful purple-leaved ensete, which are going to look great against the blue wall.
People won’t have seen a lot of the crops that we’re going to be growing there. We are hopefully going to get a papaya three there with some fruit on it too, and a mango tree and possibly a jacaranda or an orange tree. So, there is a massive amount of really wonderful plants going in, which I’m hoping the public are going to really stop and talk about and then hence talk about CAMFED.
Catherine Boyce, CAMFED, Director of Enterprise Development Our hope is that the CAMFED Garden at Chelsea will raise awareness of the vital role that young women in rural Africa play in food production and in tackling climate change.
Esnath Divasoni, Agricultural Entrepreneur, Zimbabwe We have a lot of CAMA (CAMFED Association) members who are into agribusinesses and who want to take it a step further and develop ourselves to be sustainable and to be able to provide for our families.
Jilayne Rickards, Garden Designer We’ve seen African-inspired gardens at Chelsea, but nothing quite like this.