Help 30 Women From Talokoto, The Gambia To Learn Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship Training And Change Their Lives By Starting Their Own Businesses. 

Posted on by lucasbt1990

Donate today to help us give them the skills, knowledge, & confidence to improve their land, yield, and livelihoods.

What is the Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship Program?

The Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship Program is one of the most successful we offer. The program first teaches students how to make and manage their very own micro garden, then entrepreneurship, specifically related to micro gardening, gives them the knowledge to use that skill to make money and improve their livelihood. 

This program has been implemented by MyFarm – Africa Startup many times and funded by ITC, YEP, and The European Union and has proven extremely successful.

One year ago we implemented this training program in Jiroff, rural Gambia, for 25 participants. We are so pleased to tell you that 6 of these participants have successfully started their own businesses and are improving their lives in the process. 10 have started full time employment across the Gambia, and the others have the knowledge, skills, and confidence to get going when the time is right 🙂

We believe in a very hands-on and practical approach to training. Our training guides are fun and easy to digest and learnings are reinforced by innovative learning methods to make comprehensive training programs, giving participants the best possible chance of success

What is a Micro Garden?

A micro garden is an intensive agricultural technique that utilises small spaces for big yields and was the focus for the second week of the program. It is perfect for the Gambia and other African countries, especially in the cities. Anything with a shallow root system can be planted and either consumed or sold at market for a profit, and the best part is, virtually everything in a micro garden is recycled or can be purchased for extremely small amounts of money. Lettuce, onion, herbs, aubergine, radishes, and carrots are just some of the plants that thrive in a micro garden. 

What will they learn?


Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship training can be implemented in 2 weeks. The first is an intensive skills week where participants will learn everything they need to know about setting up and maintaining their own micro gardens.

Towards the end of the first week students begin to be exposed to entrepreneurship by starting to initiate discussions around business and business principles using the amazing ‘How To Make Money’ newspaper (available to view here).

They will also use entrepreneurship videos’ and applications (available to view here), and will start playing Dipeo, the entrepreneurship board game. The final day of the first week sees students create their first action plans; these at this point are related to how they will start making their micro garden at home, later they will be used to start their very own businesses.

At every Micro Gardening training program students are gifted the tools and equipment they need to start their gardens. The students we teach do not have much, mostly they are from remote locations with very limited resources and this gesture really provides the enthusiasm and excitement needed for them to succeed with their gardens. 

The second week links the micro gardening skill with entrepreneurship. We do this through practical training, educational role playing, the fun and easy to digest ‘How To Make Money’ newspaper, entrepreneurship videos and applications, and other innovative learning methods. The week is about getting them to think critically about businesses and analyse their needs to understand what it takes for them to start their own businesses. Lots of practical and fun role playing leads up to a fantastic finale to the week. The real life selling day. The real-life selling day is where students put all they have learned into practice and go out to a busy Gambian market and sell products from MyFarm (soaps, creams, seedlings, micro tables etc). For the day they will have to prepare marketing materials, record the stock they take, organise their team and utilize individual strengths, create nice displays, and of course use our 7 point sales technique.

We try to give students real-life experience wherever we can. We give students who express an interest in actually selling the micro garden training as a business the opportunity to do training in real life to invited guests. We love doing this as it helps the students and it gives back to the community too.

Throughout entrepreneurship week the MyFarm team provide individual support and guidance for students and their business ideas. At the end of the week all students must create their very own action plans related to their business ideas. After huge encouragement and a big well done, students graduate with certificates and are then off to start their “seed to business” journey.

Follow-up is always created using whatsapp groups and site visits where possible. 

This training program has now been used all over the Gambia, and people, communities, and organisations are now seeing the benefit it can have on individuals.

30 beautiful ladies from the small village of Talokoto, WCR, Gambia have approached us because they are desperate to have the opportunity to learn these skills for themselves. Talokoto is a small village, but is unique in The Gambia for its progressiveness. The village is the only village in Gambia (that we or anyone else knows of) with a Woman Akalo, Akalo’s are the head of the community within a village. 

The women of Talokoto have been running a women’s garden in the village for a long time, but as with everywhere in the Gambia, they are extremely seasonal in what they produce. Micro Gardening would help them combat their seasonality and enable them to grow vegetables to sell all year round. With a relatively small amount of funding, each lady will have their very own micro table to grow in in the wet season and learn all the skills needed to make sure growing is happening all year round. The ladies of Talokoto are one big community, even though they will all have their own tables, they have already expressed that they will collate all the tables and use them as a community growing space for everyone to benefit from. 

During the program, we plan to to add additional skills for the women to learn that will also help them in their usual garden. We want to give these ladies a platform to ensure that their land is being constantly improved in tandem with their yields, thus improving the food security of this village for years to come. We will teach them composting, how to make and use raised beds, how to make key hole garden beds, how to make and use sustainable biochar, and many more tips and tricks that they can use to improve their soil, yields and their livelihoods 🙂 

Every small donation will help us reach our goal of training these beautiful women. This program and our organisation is completely non-profit and all donations made will go directly to the training program itself.

The budget of the program with breakdown of all costs associated is available to anyone who would like it. Simply email lucas@africastartup.org to get those details.

Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship In Njau CRR, The Gambia

Posted on by lucasbt1990

25 trainees from CRR have successfully completed their training program on Micro Gardening & Entrepreneurship in Njau, Gambia.

The participants from CRR were without doubt the most engaged and eager to learn group we have ever had. They wanted to fully utilise every aspect of the training program and were excited by every skill or piece of knowledge they learned.

The first week of the program taught trainees how to make and manage their very own micro gardens. Trainees were taught how to make a micro garden table, how to recycle bottles, tyres, and gallon containers into usable and productive garden beds. They were shown how to make and use a hydroponic system to grow mint using abandoned waste pipes. The week also introduced some key garden principles including planting distance, making fertiliser, how to control pests, and labelling and record keeping.

Trainees had a variety of learning tools to help them learn. Lamin & Babucarr (The MyFarm Micro Gardening Trainers) demonstrated the practical skills, that the trainees had to repeat. Each and every skill learned has a collection of educational applications developed by Leap Learning (www.leaplearning.no), these are used to reinforce and further learning. A comprehensive training guide covering everything micro garden-related was also given to every trainee, this was used on the training program, and also for them to refer back to in the future when needed. 

Entrepreneurship week mixed fun & practical role-playing, real-life selling practice, and usage of our brand new Entrepreneurship Lab!

Week 2 was the start of entrepreneurship training. This week trainees started to be taught how to actually use micro gardening to make money. Our entrepreneurship training is always fun, practical, and aims to get trainees to think critically about business, and themselves. We use a lot of discussion and role-playing to help students learn from each other as well as from us and link everything to the ‘How To Make Money’ newspaper. Always on hand are also 25 entrepreneurship videos and 125 applications each helping trainees learn different principles of business.

Brand New Way To Learn Entrepreneurship

This training allowed us to test a brand new concept. The Entrepreneurship Lab covers a complete curriculum of key business principles and engages students on everything from why and how to start a business, to marketing, controlling money, and creating an action plan. 

The Entrepreneurship Lab engages students in practical, hands-on tasks, and fun role playing designed to equip them with lifelong skills to help them succeed in not only business, but also in full time employment…and life.

In the Lab we have a huge variety of learning materials for students to use including entrepreneurship videos and applications, hands on games, role playing ideas and materials, banners, Dipeo the entrepreneurship board game, and a laptop at research corner.

 The Lab encourages students to reflect on and analyse businesses, their needs, and what they could do to make even more money.

The third and final week of the program was all about bringing everything together. Trainees were put through their paces and made to think and analyse more than ever before. During the week trainees had to put everything they learned into practice on an amazing day of real life selling in Farerfeni market. Before the day they had to plan roles for each team member, record stock and wholesale prices, prepare marketing materials, and make a plan of how to keep customers coming back for more and more…

We are pleased to tell you that this day was absolutely amazing. They set up and managed a stall right in the centre of a busy market, selected a fantastic location, worked well as a team, and sold over 6000GMD worth of products in just 1 hour. Each team member played their role perfectly and deserved the BBQ we would spend the profits on 🙂

Throughout the program, participants were encouraged to think of their own business ideas related to micro gardening. The MyFarm trainers would then give individual advice and support to help guide them. At the end of the training, all participants created their own action plans for the next steps of their business adventures.

A huge variety of business ideas came about, here are some of our favourites. Mot, a trainee from Njau wants to make compost and sell this to local farmers, he would also like to run training programs on how to make compost. The last day of the training saw Mot train 15 guests from the community on how to make compost to give him the real life practice he needs.

Modou Lamin is the head of Reforest The Future, where the training program was held. He would like to train people how to make micro garden tables to help farmers in the rural communities be less seasonal and ensure they can grow crops all year round. Modou wants to market his business by running free training sessions within his own community, then he will set up micro tables at local Lumo’s to get people talking.

Yama is probably the most improved trainee of this program. At the beginning, she was incredibly shy but flourished throughout. She would like to use her micro garden to grow crops which she can then turn into products like soap. Understanding that this may take a while, she will first start by growing nurseries, which will be sold to local women’s gardens.

A program like this cannot be done without partners…and we have worked with two great ones. Firstly ITC and YEP Gambia, who funded and supported the project. Their vision and commitment to support the youth of The Gambia is second to none. We have worked with YEP on several projects before and their brilliant team realised the benefit the micro garden we had at MyFarm could have for others in the country, and have worked with us to spread the word through skills training programs (find YEP here… https://www.yep.gm/ ). The Women’s Initiative Gambia have been instrumental in planning and organising this training program, Isatou Ceesay and her team helped select the location, mobilise the participants and helped so much with the day to day running of the program..

Well done to all the trainees of CRR. We cannot wait to come back in the future and watch your businesses grow 🙂

Soap Production, Micro Gardening, & Entreprenurship Training At Mile

Posted on by lucasbt1990
graduation of the training program at Mile 2 prison

30 inmates at Mile 2 Prison In The Gambia have just successfully completed an intensive 3 week training program on soap production, micro gardening, & entreprenurship. We couldnt be more proud of them 🙂

This training program was full of excitement, learning, and happiness. Just the way we like it!

Sharing skills and knowledge has always been at the heart of what we do here at MyFarm. We invite the local community into our grounds everyday to learn all about permaculture, agriculture, processing, and of course entrepreneurship! Over the years we have developed and implemented many training programs, both at MyFarm, and in the field…more often than not under a mango tree in sleepy rural villages.

MyFarm wants to train anybody and everybody who wants to learn. No one is turned away if they have the right attitude to learn…no one. As our head trainer Isatou Bah says, “I want to train those that need it most, ladies in rural villages, disabled people, and people who have a real need for that skill”. When the opportunity came to train and support inmates at Mile 2 prison in The Gambia, we had to accept.

We Use Innovative Learning Methods At All Our Training Programs.

The training program would be a 3 week intensive course in soap production, micro gardening, and entrepreneurship with 30 inmates at Mile 2 prison in The Gambia . The three week program aimed to first equip trainees with a tangible and marketable skill to support and facilitate their reintegration back into society. Then to boost their knowledge of business and business principles to help them either start their own businesses, or gain good full time employment and thus contribute back to society.

A Huge Thank You To YEP Gambia & Mile 2 Prison For Making This Training Program Happen

In week 1 Isatou and the processing team engaged the inmates in soap production training. Here trainees learned how to make a variety of fragranced soaps, body butter, lip balm, and laundry soap. Soap production training is very practical and the trainees enjoyed getting their hands dirty (or clean :)). Valuable and transferable skills are taught throughout this program, including measuring, labelling, packaging, time keeping, and record keeping. We make soap at MyFarm nearly everyday, and have trained hundreds of people how to make it; none have been as enthusiastic and as willing to learn as the inmates at Mile 2. By the end of the week the trainees made, on their own and without any guidance, all of the beauty products demonstrated throughout the week.

A micro garden is an intensive agricultural technique that utilities small spaces for big yields and was the focus for the second week of the program. It is perfect for Gambia and other African countries, especially in the cities. Anything with a shallow root system can be planted and either consumed or sold at market for a profit, and the best part is, virtually everything in a micro garden is recycled, or can be purchased for extremely small amounts of money. Lettuce, onion, herbs, aubergine, radishes, and carrots are just some of the plants that thrive in a micro garden. During the week the trainees were taught how to make a micro garden table, how to recycle bottles, tyres, and gallon containers into usable and productive garden beds. They were shown how to make and use a hydroponic system to grow mint using abandoned waste pipes. The week also introduced some key garden principals including planting distance, making fertiliser, how to control pests, and labelling and record keeping.

The third and final week was a thought provoking, practical based entrepreneurship week that is designed to introduce and develop knowledge of key business principals. At MyFarm we don’t just stand in front of trainees and preach. We engaged them with expert trainers specially developed training materials, fun and relatable games, group role plays and discussions, and educational applications. The entrepreneurship week brings all the other learnings together, we believe it is the most robust training of its kind. On hand throughout the week was MyFarm’s ‘How To Make Money’ newspaper, which is the most fun and thorough business training guide we have seen (download it here…its free). Dipeo…the entrepreneurship board game, where players can buy and sell goods at market, this is always trainees favourite. Our entire collection of entrepreneurship applications with 27 categories covering a complete curriculum of business principals from planning, to marketing, to knowing your customer. And. Many more materials we are testing for the brand new entrepreneurship lab we are developing to use all around the world (Learn more here… Leap Learning)

This project doesn’t stop after the 3 week program. We and our partners have a commitment to sustainability. 5 prison officers were also trained during the program, so they could carry on producing soap and growing in the micro garden long after we have left. YEP, the funder for the project allowed money to create a hub at the prison, so everything the prison needs to make soap and make the micro garden flourish has been left at the prison. 2 tablets pre installed with our entire collection of educational apps has also been gifted to the prison; these will not only help reinforce the learnings from the training, they now have over 500 educational applications covering a complete curriculum of literacy, numeracy, and logic. After leaving the prison, the inmates have the opportunity to come to MyFarm and receive more training and support for free, this will help ease them back into society and give them the confidence, skills, and knowledge to ensure they do not reoffend.

A program like this cannot be done without partners…and we have worked with two great ones. Firstly ITC and YEP Gambia, who funded and supported the project. Their vision and commitment to support the youth of The Gambia is second to none. We have worked with YEP on several projects before and their brilliant team realised the benefit the micro garden we had at MyFarm could have for others in the country, and have worked with us to spread the word through skills training programs (find YEP here… https://www.yep.gm/ ). Secondly Mile 2 prison. We have been so impressed with the prison whilst working with them over the last few weeks. The team are truly committed to becoming a correctional centre and are working on many programs designed to give inmates skills for when they leave.

This program then was a collaboration of institutions in The Gambia and overall was a huge success. The graduation ceremony attracted media from all around The Gambia, and the trainees are proud of the new skills they have acquired. We cannot wait to do more training programs at Mile2 in the near future.