Cultivation of oyster mushrooms, Nov 2019

November 2019

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Pump for Adrinah

Adrinah Zulu, widow and mother of two children and care of 8 orphans, could buy a partially sponsored pump thanks to a donation from a Dutch donor. Adrinah had the pump installed on her land in Mutenguleni. The nearest neighbours also use the water.

Manual drilling of the borehole at the land of Adrinah.

One of Adrinah's older children would like to study agricultural science. To finance this, Adrinah wants to grow tomatoes and sweet potatoes and pay for the study from the yield. This is now possible thanks to the pump.

Oyster mushroom training

As an additional source of income, Adrinah also wants to grow oyster mushrooms, this requires a lot of water. A little bit of money was remaining from the donation and Jacana decided to organize a course on growing oyster mushrooms. Five other interested people had registered for this.

Bernadette Phiri was asked to facilitate the training. Bernadette was guided in 2017 by Chris Holtslag of www.helsieni.fi and Jacana in expanding her oyster mushroom farm.

Bernadette accepted the challenge and trained the group very seriously. But first she visited all six potential oyster mushroom cultivators and identified their needs and challenges. This has resulted in a two-day training.

The training consisted of half a day of theory about the cultivation of oyster mushrooms and half a day of practice.

The second day the participants were trained in business and financial planning. All participants, wrote a business plan for setting up an oyster mushroom business. In addition they calculated what it would cost to grow 1 kg of oyster mushrooms, this is important to check profitability of the business.

Jacana is very proud of Bernadette. She has been able to offer the participants a lot of new and useful information and she will continue to guide them over the next few months.

Refresh of positions

Jacana has been growing since April 2015. Although all board members and management are fully behind Jacana's work and strategy, one day there will come a time to refresh positions.

After more than four years, chairperson Laura Kurth has decided to release her position on the Dutch Jacana board. Laura has been a board member since the foundation of Jacana. We are very grateful for all her -always voluntary- work. René van Dongen takes over the chairmanship. We thank Laura and wish René lots of wisdom in his new position.

Dinie Nijssen steps back as director of Jacana Zambia, Rik Haanen takes over directorship in Zambia. Dinie continues to work for Jacana as a resource manager, where she is responsible for raising funds and initiating innovative projects.

Dinie will take over the board position of Rik in the Zambian and Dutch boards.