From weeds to food to money: amaranth transforming lives in Kenya

By Isaac Ogutu, Farm Systems and Sustainability Officer, Ripple Effect Kenya, and Anna Borsboom, Digital Marketing Manager

Amaranth is a plant originating from South America, which produces edible leaves, and grain from the flowers when it matures. According to the National Institutes of Health, certain amaranth species are considered to be weeds. It’s a versatile crop that is relatively resistant to drought and heavy rainfall, and gives good yields even under low soil fertility. Amaranth matures within 75 to 90 days, with the ability to harvest leaves in just 3 weeks of being planted.

The crop has a variety of uses:

1. The leaves can be used in salads and stews.
2. The stems and older leaves can be used as livestock feed.
3. The wholegrains can be boiled, roasted, popped, and eaten.
4. The grains can be milled into flour, which: without being blended with other flours can be used to make nutritious amaranth porridge; when blended with wheat flour can be used for home baking, making ‘chapati’ (flat bread), ‘mandazi’, doughnuts, and pancakes; when blended with maize or sorghum flour can be used to make ‘ugali’, a dense porridge.

Our Ripple Effect team in Kenya has been leading the training of participant farmers in Migori, teaching them how to grow and make the best use of their new amaranth crops. Our project participants' ability to harvest amaranth has helped them achieve food security and access a variety of nutrients that help improve their health. One of our participant farmers in Migori, Florence Gori, is now supplying amaranth flour to the local school, to be used to make porridge for the children as part of a school feeding programme. She says that the children consuming the porridge, amongst the vegetables and bananas she provides, are very healthy.

The climate resilience of the plant will allow Florence, like other participants, to continue harvesting throughout the next years and help those around her access healthy and substantial meals.

The amaranth plant, which some now consider to be a ‘superfood’, is gluten-free and beneficial for most organs in the body. Amongst other benefits, it works to boost the immune system, fight inflammation, normalizes blood pressure, and it may also help to prevent cancer. Most importantly for our project, we have seen our participants with HIV and AIDS able to build their immune systems and be in better positions to fight off illnesses.

“Amaranth is not only a novel crop, that is highly adaptive, and suited to health, economic, nutritional needs of vulnerable groups of farmers, [...] but it also very much contributed to social inclusion, building immunity of HIV/AIDs participants and contributing to attainment of viral suppression.” Alfred Juma, Country Programs and Partner support Manager Ripple Effect Kenya.

The farmers we worked with in this project can not only use their amaranth harvest for themselves, but can also ship part of it to the Pamoja Suna East Farmers’ Cooperative Society to earn an income. Doing this allows the cooperative to add value to the grain and sustain the amaranth value chain, while helping farmers gain financial security and improve their livelihoods.

The cooperative society makes 3 products from amaranth grain: 

1. Pure Amaranth flour 
2. Composite Ugali/Uji flour 
3. Composite Amaranth & Cassava flour 

At the value addition stage, the product is weighed, tested for moisture levels, precooked, milled, mixed thoroughly in the required ratios, and packed in the right quantities. The flour packs are then sold on across the region, enabling communities to make a range of meals, snacks and side-dishes.

Not only is the Cooperative Society selling amaranth-based products to further communities, but the farmers also are sharing their newly acquired knowledge with their neighbours, creating a ripple effect of change. 

“Ripple Effect removed us from zero and now we can earn 41,000 Kenyan Shillings in a month. People in the community consider us as very rich just because of smart farming we learnt from Ripple Effect. Thank you very much and continue supporting others too to uplift them as you have done to us” Florence Gori, Amaranth Farmer, Migori.

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The Amaranth Value Chain project has been incredibly successful in transforming lives of smallholder farmers in Migori, Kenya. We had set out to reach 8,000 farmers and surpassed this target by training 9,561 participants (of which 3,072 were adult males, 6,489 were adult females, 883 were young people & 180 were also persons with disabilities). This project has embodied our three main areas of work at Ripple Effect: sustainable agriculture, gender and social inclusion, and enterprise development.

With this project being supplementary to our Enterprising Migori project, we have learned that, as it was well suited to the environment and objectives, it enhanced the overall results of the parent project. In this case, it was made evident by the achievement of improved immune systems amongst the HIV/AIDS positive participants.

The key to this is the Amaranth Value Chain project suited the farmers’ needs and environment, allowing the growth of amaranth to be sustainable and better owned by them. The harvest of amaranth is a great solution to the need for food, better nutrition, and increased incomes in a context of low precipitation, poor soils and high temperatures hence low initial capital. Not only this, but being open pollinated, the seeds boosted local seed banks and eased access to quality planting materials. Farmers multiplied the initial 104kg to over 3,700kg of seeds that were shared and planted.

What was particularly great to see is how this project enabled the integration of people with HIV with the rest of the community. By encouraging people living with HIV and AIDS to participate in our training sessions, we empowered them to become a resource to their community, able to share their knowledge and owning uniquely valuable product that aligns with the region’s health and economic needs.

Our team is very thankful for the funding that allowed us to implement the Amaranth Value Chain project. We foresee our farmer participants to spread their knowledge far and wide, with seeds pollinating across the region – this will bring new prospects for the communities in Migori, who will benefit from food and nutritional security, with increased incomes.

“Through collaboration with research, there has been an improvement in grain amaranth productivity since it’s a new climate resilient crop. Being a new crop for communities living in Migori and looking at its health benefits, amaranth is set to become a major cash crop for farmers in Migori” Isaac Ogutu, Farm Systems, and sustainability officer, Ripple Effect Kenya.

Want to learn more about our work in Kenya? Read more here. 

You could also set up a monthly donation to support us in deploying further sustainable solutions in rural Africa, to help farmers achieve food and financial security.

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