Why the F2F Victory Garden Campaign Matters (Part 2) — By Julie Craig-Lautens

In April 2024, I traveled to Pursat Province, Cambodia, for my first in-person meeting with the Face-to-Face (F2F) Victory Garden Campaign Country Manager, Ms. In Sakara, and her team.  I am a coach with Face-to-Face and also a donor to this grassroots organization.

The Victory Garden Campaign aims to mobilize rural grassroots communities in Malawi and Cambodia to achieve sustainable solutions in the fight against hunger and poverty. Through the creation of high-yield, low-cost victory gardens, villagers learn how to grow enough food to eat, earn income, improve nutrition, and lead healthy lives building a sense that change comes from within.

The Campaign improves the quality of life for all residents in a village — the more food people can grow, the stronger and more resilient a village will be. Victory gardens are easy to create, cost nothing for the villager to maintain, and produce food within weeks.

Villages strengthen community resilience as their home gardens produce a constant supply of food and nutrition for the foreseeable future, as well as possible food surplus to sell. Villagers grow more than 20 different vegetables in their gardens, helping them feed their families and lessen the risk of relying on just one crop. They also grow more food in their fields, previously used only for one crop, by scaling-up agro-ecology farming practices they have learned from their home gardens.

The Campaign has shown villagers can grow up to 25 plant species in a plot as small as 3 meters x 3 meters over $10 worth of food per month — a significant amount of money in a nation where people make less than $1 a day.

In Cambodia, current population 17,121,847, 17.8% live below the poverty line.  Cambodia’s subsistence rice farmers cannot escape debt and poverty, trapped by the high cost of growing rice and low profits caused by cheap rice imported from other countries. To raise money for their families, these farmers turn to hard day labor, hours from home or take jobs in factories and their children are forced to drop out of school as the family becomes trapped in a cycle of poverty.  School-age children in Cambodia are missing school because of caregivers’ disability, extreme family poverty, being from a marginalized ethnic minority, or coming from a remote area of the country where access to education is severely compromised by the lack of school infrastructure and teaching staff. Also, there are many studies done about parents who have to migrate for work and the drop off rate of schooling as the child must now perform duties at home or is forced to travel with the parent.

Country Manager In Sakara, her two assistants, and a team of 17 garden facilitators and 17 assistants help villagers create and maintain small family victory gardens. The charity teaches organic gardening techniques and promotes the sharing of seeds, cuttings, and know-how among villagers, along with encouragement and the occasional helping hand. This approach encourages villagers to build self-reliance and community connections, rather than depending on supplies from the charity.

During my trip to visit Sakara in April 2024, I witnessed the full team working together to plan for the transition to the rainy season, in a workshop led by Sakara, her assistants, and Ken.  The group worked together through discussions and shared some fun games to build the technical knowledge of the facilitators and assistants.

The Victory Garden Campaign provides a path to a more positive future.