Smart Gardens and Climate-Resilient Crops: Enhancing School Environments and Agricultural Sustainability
Objective: The Pioneer Child Development Programme aims to revolutionize school environments by introducing and advocating
for smart gardens and facilitating the cultivation of climate-resilient crops. This initiative not only enhances educational
experiences but also contributes to broader climate resilience and sustainable agricultural practices.
What Are Smart Gardens?
Smart gardens are innovative, sustainable gardening systems that help to optimize plant growth and resource use
through utilization of available resources. In schools, these gardens serve as interactive learning tools, engaging students
with practical, hands-on experiences in agriculture and environmental stewardship. Also, smart gardens helps to use small
sizes of land and make them more productive than traditional practices.
Enhancing Climate-Resilience Agriculture and Practices at Community Level
At PCDP, we educate and inform communities about climate change impacts and how they can lead to climate adaptive practices
through resilient farming. For example, by educating them on smart-gardens and drip kit irrigation, PCDP helps to create
awareness of the best practices aimed to address the pressing issue of climate change and improve food production and economic
growth. Farmers at community level are also facilitated with climate-adaptive crops such as hass avocados, oranges, geraniums,
and Azolla to enhance healthy eating and sustainable food production.
Also, PCDP offers farmers’ training on sustainable farming practices such as harvesting rain water for crop farming and
aquaculture. This is mainly achieved by facilitating farmers with dam liners where they are only required to excavate the
dams at their homes and fence for safety. Diverse farming practices is not only relevant in the changing environment but
also helps to utilize available resources optimally. In addition, use of best farming practices like conical gardens helps
farmers to utilize their lands and help even those in urban areas to grow crops like vegetables for consumption while improving
balanced diet. We offer training sessions to farmers to educate them on how to develop such sustainable farming practices and
settings.
To enhance climate resilience, PCDP also provides enrolled parents especially those with infants with water purification kits
(solvatten kits) to improve safe child development. This helps to increase infants’ survival rate despite the climate change impacts.
