Growing a Future in Cape Town

On a drive along the N2 Freeway in Cape Town, South Africa, travelers speed past endless clusters of corrugated metal shacks that fill the sandy Cape Flats area between the airport and iconic Table Mountain.

“I grew up in this area,” says Lloyd Whitfield, a retired dairy products company owner and member of the Rotary Club of Constantia, pointing out where his family once owned land. “There was just bush. I used to ride horses, and we used to shoot game in this area – there was nothing.”

Now, more than a million people are crowded here, the townships established when black residents were forcibly relocated out of “white areas” during the apartheid years. More recently, the townships are the destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking to benefit from Cape Town’s growing economy.

But the rate of migration has outpaced job growth.

The Constantia Rotary Club has helped set up a community garden and farm training center for young residents in Khayelitsha, the largest township. The club is working with Abalimi Bezekhaya, a local organization that helps create income-producing gardening opportunities in the community, and partnered with Rotary clubs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany to secure a global grant from The Rotary Foundation worth $46,000, on top of a previous matching grant.

“The philosophy behind both projects is to try to get young people, men and women, into the gardens,” says Kelly Winckworth, treasurer of the Constantia club. “Traditionally, this kind of work is older people, and largely women.”

Settled in a grassy park across from a subdivision of modest brick homes is the Moya we Khaya Peace Gardens plot. The garden adds to Abalimi’s farming capacity and creates more financial stability for the organization.

“We grow everything,” says Abalimi operations director Christina Kaba, who works in the garden with about a dozen others, growing pumpkins, green peppers, basil, thyme, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, and lots of other vegetables and herbs. Those vegetables supply Abalimi’s Harvest of Hope venture, which sells boxes of vegetables to middle-class Capetonians for a monthly fee.

The Constantia Rotary Club first developed a 5,000-square-meter garden on city land with Abalimi in 2013, installing infrastructure such as an irrigation system and protective fencing.