Mar 23, 2025 • 1 min read

Growing Food Feeds Family & Brings Income

Learning to use her available resource of land to grow her own food, a mother is able to support her family.

My name is Shanta* and my family has five members. My parents died when I was a child and I became orphaned. I used to work at other’s homes as a slave. My marriage happened at a young age and my mother-in-law was paralysed and my child was a son. Thus began my sad life. Economics has been very stressful in my family and I did not have food to eat daily. I couldn’t take care of my family because of financial problems.

The Transformational Community Development (TCD) classes that I attended regularly taught me how to support my family. I learned to do vegetable farming to be able to feed my family and sell vegetables for Income. My son started going to boarding school. Enrolling in TCD lessons solved my economic problem. It is a great change for me. I am very happy to share my success story and thankful to the GHNI organization.

Transformational Community Development (TCD) Update

TCD© is GHNI’s coaching-based process for helping villages transform themselves and break the cycle of extreme poverty.

Water

Village children have been used to drinking dirty water in school. Wherever we went, we saw this condition. Therefore, we taught the village children about water purification and drinking water that has been purified in the sunshine. When going to school the water bottle should be with them to keep them safe from many diseases.

Education

All women members of the village attended TCD and we taught them to read. To learn about how much education is learned by the members of the village, we evaluated the names and addresses of 15 women who passed the examination. This was amazing and happy for the villagers who also learned to read in their old age.

Food

The Committee members and other members of the village had a chance to learn about healthy diets, eating a variety of foods. They learned to cultivate vegetables at home for health. They cultivated these vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkin, and ginger etc. They learned “don’t keep empty land.”

Income

Villagers learned the benefits of types of crops to grow and how to plant in increments to have continual produce to sell for Income Generation. They also learned about how to handle the income from farming.

Wellness

As it got colder this winter, many villagers’ goats died. The greatest treatment was discussed for home and village health and treatment for goats. They decided to have a veterinary doctor come to vaccinate the goats. In this way the community is very much in agreement to solve the goat Wellness problem by TCD, not just for human beings.