Abalimi Bezekhaya

Abalimi Bezekhaya (meaning farmers of the home in isiXhosa), established 1982, is a non-profit urban-farming organisation that aims to support individuals and groups from disadvantaged communities in Cape Town through providing facilitation and training of organic food production for nutrition, health, food security and income generation, as well as providing market access. Support is provided from survival to livelihood level in line with the Farmer Development Chain (FDC) and Sustainability Index (SI).

Abalimi provides the following support services, which are the four pillars of development:

1) Training and mentoring, as well as professional extension services (e.g. organisation building, research, soil testing, monitoring and evaluation, management and accounting services).

2) Supply of agricultural inputs for production (e.g. manure, seeds and seedlings).

3) Soil and infrastructure capital input, which the farmers cannot build up on their own.  This includes the major part of their manure to improve soil infrastructure within the harsh dune sand environment and extreme weather conditions and irrigation infrastructure.

4) Access to market for supply of surplus produce (e.g. Harvest of Hope).