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April 2025 newsletter
15 April 2025
Doubling the difference
We are delighted that, for the fourth year running, we have been selected to be part of the Big Give’s Green Match Fund: a seven-day online match funding campaign dedicated to helping charities playing a vital role in tackling pressing environmental issues. This means that, for the week of the campaign (22-29 April), the value of any donation you make will automatically be doubled!
The money raised will be used to train more farmers in Deep Bed Farming and provide additional capacity-building for farmers on how to monitor soil health on their farmland in our Chiwamba climate-smart hub. If we hit our target of £16,000 (£8,000 of individual donations which will be matched by another £8,000), it will make a massive contribution towards our goal of training more than a thousand farmers in Chiwamba.
The project will expand the training of farmers to enable them to conduct monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on their land. This addition to our hub model will build farmers’ capacity to respond to and mitigate the effects of disasters such as drought and flood, which are increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change. Farmers will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to measure how these disasters are affecting their land and respond quickly, including after Tiyeni’s work in their communities has come to an end. This approach provides farmers with a ‘hand up’ rather than a ‘hand out’. We anticipate that farmers’ enhanced capacity to monitor and respond to disasters will decrease potential future needs for emergency aid.
Upskilling farmers in M&E for their land will further augment farmers’ self-sufficiency by enabling them to respond quickly to disasters, or any changes in climate/weather, decreasing or eliminating their need for external support. Traditionally farming is passed down from one generation to the next. Farmers worked with natural processes and weather events, which included monitoring these processes and responding accordingly. However, over the years, and with influence from the Global North, many of these practices have been lost. Deep Bed Farming’s regenerative quality combined with the M&E upskilling restores this knowledge of how to manage their land in harmony with natural processes and weather events, which addresses beneficiaries’ need for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The M&E training will directly equip beneficiaries with the information, skills, and technical support they need to increase their crop yields, income, and quality of their land. Farmers will be trained in catchment management and to be able to use simple data collection tools, such as recording crop yield on 10 metre² surveys, focus group discussions and recording observations on silt collection. Farmers will be trained and mentored on how to select relevant indicators, track progress and adjust their practices accordingly.
The M&E training was piloted in our Mulanje hub last year where it has been showing very positive results. According to Mr Dickson Cholasa, Chairman of Magagada: “What we have learnt from the catchment project and the assessment of soil and water loss has helped us so much to understand that we are losing too much soil and nutrients through the current practices”.
We now want to roll out the training so that farmers across Malawi can benefit from these techniques and our Chiwamba hub is the ideal place to begin to mainstream this training. We plan to make the training standard practice as we expand and collaborate more closely with the government. And Chiwamba, close to Lilongwe and the Ministry of Agriculture, provides us with a good opportunity to engage Ministry staff so that they can observe the results first hand. The pride of the farmers as they showcase their crops speaks more eloquently than any report could.
But we can’t do this without you! When the campaign begins on 22 April, please consider making a donation here and the amount will be doubled automatically.
The money raised will be used to train more farmers in Deep Bed Farming and provide additional capacity-building for farmers on how to monitor soil health on their farmland in our Chiwamba climate-smart hub. If we hit our target of £16,000 (£8,000 of individual donations which will be matched by another £8,000), it will make a massive contribution towards our goal of training more than a thousand farmers in Chiwamba.
The project will expand the training of farmers to enable them to conduct monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on their land. This addition to our hub model will build farmers’ capacity to respond to and mitigate the effects of disasters such as drought and flood, which are increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change. Farmers will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to measure how these disasters are affecting their land and respond quickly, including after Tiyeni’s work in their communities has come to an end. This approach provides farmers with a ‘hand up’ rather than a ‘hand out’. We anticipate that farmers’ enhanced capacity to monitor and respond to disasters will decrease potential future needs for emergency aid.
Upskilling farmers in M&E for their land will further augment farmers’ self-sufficiency by enabling them to respond quickly to disasters, or any changes in climate/weather, decreasing or eliminating their need for external support. Traditionally farming is passed down from one generation to the next. Farmers worked with natural processes and weather events, which included monitoring these processes and responding accordingly. However, over the years, and with influence from the Global North, many of these practices have been lost. Deep Bed Farming’s regenerative quality combined with the M&E upskilling restores this knowledge of how to manage their land in harmony with natural processes and weather events, which addresses beneficiaries’ need for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The M&E training will directly equip beneficiaries with the information, skills, and technical support they need to increase their crop yields, income, and quality of their land. Farmers will be trained in catchment management and to be able to use simple data collection tools, such as recording crop yield on 10 metre² surveys, focus group discussions and recording observations on silt collection. Farmers will be trained and mentored on how to select relevant indicators, track progress and adjust their practices accordingly.
The M&E training was piloted in our Mulanje hub last year where it has been showing very positive results. According to Mr Dickson Cholasa, Chairman of Magagada: “What we have learnt from the catchment project and the assessment of soil and water loss has helped us so much to understand that we are losing too much soil and nutrients through the current practices”.
We now want to roll out the training so that farmers across Malawi can benefit from these techniques and our Chiwamba hub is the ideal place to begin to mainstream this training. We plan to make the training standard practice as we expand and collaborate more closely with the government. And Chiwamba, close to Lilongwe and the Ministry of Agriculture, provides us with a good opportunity to engage Ministry staff so that they can observe the results first hand. The pride of the farmers as they showcase their crops speaks more eloquently than any report could.
But we can’t do this without you! When the campaign begins on 22 April, please consider making a donation here and the amount will be doubled automatically.
The power of partnership
In February, Tiyeni had the opportunity to participate in the African Water and Sanitation Association (AfWASA) 2nd International Congress and Exhibition in Kampala, Uganda. The theme of the conference was ‘Water and Sanitation for all in Africa’ and Tiyeni’s contribution was in partnership with MetaMeta, presenting a One Stop Shop for Climate, Food and Water.
The partnership between Tiyeni and MetaMeta is a long and fruitful one, with significant synergies. MetaMeta is a social enterprise based in Wageningen in the Netherlands. One of their activities is the coordination of SMART Centres: Simple Market-based, Affordable, Repairable Technologies - examples include improving existing hand-dug wells, new manually drilled tube wells, low-cost pedal, hand and solar pumps, tube groundwater recharge, underground storage tanks and household water filters.
One of the SMART Centres is in Mzuzu in Malawi. Colin Andrews, Tiyeni’s Chair, visited the Centre in 2015 and met Henk Holtslag who is co-initiator of the SMART approach and who was doing a training course at the Malawi SMART Centre at the time.
Colin and Henk saw the benefit in working together to develop the synergy in the combination of Deep Bed Farming and low-cost farm wells. Deep Bed Farming involves the breaking of the hardpan and making deep trenches on contours so that rainwater will penetrate the ground even on slopes and with heavy rains. Most of the water is used for rain-fed crops such as maize but over time Deep Bed Farming recharges shallow groundwater and reduces the risk of depletion so that the many small-scale farmers become ‘watershed managers’.
Low-cost farm wells are possible if there are shallow groundwater layers. Using SMART technology, where manual drilling is possible, shallow tube wells can be made and combined with locally produced rope pumps. With water all year round, there is water for domestic use as well as for livestock and small-scale irrigation in the dry seasons. This creates a sustainable water cycle and the storage of water in the ground is an action to adapt to climate change. When used alongside Deep Bed Farming’s regenerative agriculture, the approach increases food security. In combination with low-cost technologies to pump up and treat the water at the household level, this is a solution to help reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 (which aims to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030) in rural areas where conventional technologies would be too expensive.
The partnership between Tiyeni and MetaMeta is a long and fruitful one, with significant synergies. MetaMeta is a social enterprise based in Wageningen in the Netherlands. One of their activities is the coordination of SMART Centres: Simple Market-based, Affordable, Repairable Technologies - examples include improving existing hand-dug wells, new manually drilled tube wells, low-cost pedal, hand and solar pumps, tube groundwater recharge, underground storage tanks and household water filters.
One of the SMART Centres is in Mzuzu in Malawi. Colin Andrews, Tiyeni’s Chair, visited the Centre in 2015 and met Henk Holtslag who is co-initiator of the SMART approach and who was doing a training course at the Malawi SMART Centre at the time.
Colin and Henk saw the benefit in working together to develop the synergy in the combination of Deep Bed Farming and low-cost farm wells. Deep Bed Farming involves the breaking of the hardpan and making deep trenches on contours so that rainwater will penetrate the ground even on slopes and with heavy rains. Most of the water is used for rain-fed crops such as maize but over time Deep Bed Farming recharges shallow groundwater and reduces the risk of depletion so that the many small-scale farmers become ‘watershed managers’.
Low-cost farm wells are possible if there are shallow groundwater layers. Using SMART technology, where manual drilling is possible, shallow tube wells can be made and combined with locally produced rope pumps. With water all year round, there is water for domestic use as well as for livestock and small-scale irrigation in the dry seasons. This creates a sustainable water cycle and the storage of water in the ground is an action to adapt to climate change. When used alongside Deep Bed Farming’s regenerative agriculture, the approach increases food security. In combination with low-cost technologies to pump up and treat the water at the household level, this is a solution to help reach the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1 (which aims to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030) in rural areas where conventional technologies would be too expensive.
Through the SMART Centre in Malawi, subsidized wells with rope pumps were installed at ten farms near Mzuzu that are applying Deep Bed Farming. Using these demonstration farms as examples creates demand for low-cost wells and pumps. In time, farmers who earn sufficient income through Deep Bed Farming will be able to pay for wells themselves.
In order to share this approach more widely, MetaMeta and Tiyeni have participated jointly in several water-related forums such as the ‘All Systems Connect’ forum that was organised by the IRC in 2022 in the Netherlands. The combination of Deep Bed Farming and SMART water solutions was also presented by Henk at the UN Water Conference in New York and at COP28 in Dubai in December 2024.
And in February, this combination was presented by Tiyeni’s Country Director, Isaac Monjo Chavula, and Henk at the AfWASA 2nd International Congress and Exhibition in Uganda. Isaac’s presentation was called ‘Hardpans; How breaking hardpans and low-cost farm wells are a key to reaching six SDGs’ and the description of the complementarity of the interventions was very well-received by the delegates.
On the shared exhibition stand, scale models of SMARTechs such as a rope pump, a solar pump and a water filter were presented. The approach demonstrated that MetaMeta and Tiyeni are natural partners with a clear rationale for working together to maximise the benefit of the rainwater harvesting as part of Deep Bed Farming and the groundwater harvesting done by MetaMeta’s SMART Centres. As a result of the conference, Tiyeni has received requests for follow-up meetings from the Blantyre Water Board, Southern Region Water Board, Lilongwe Water Board and the Central Region Water Board in Malawi as well as the Ugandan National Water and Sewerage Corporation and the CoAlive Foundation in Kenya.
There is more to do. There is huge benefit in Tiyeni and MetaMeta working in partnership and the presentations at the conference demonstrate that the work of the two organisations has a natural synergy. Tiyeni and MetaMeta will continue to work together to promote the combination of rain water harvesting, agriculture and low-cost farm water systems as a promising approach to help make the aims of the SDGs for Poverty, Food, Gender, Water, Work and Climate a reality in rural Africa.
In order to share this approach more widely, MetaMeta and Tiyeni have participated jointly in several water-related forums such as the ‘All Systems Connect’ forum that was organised by the IRC in 2022 in the Netherlands. The combination of Deep Bed Farming and SMART water solutions was also presented by Henk at the UN Water Conference in New York and at COP28 in Dubai in December 2024.
And in February, this combination was presented by Tiyeni’s Country Director, Isaac Monjo Chavula, and Henk at the AfWASA 2nd International Congress and Exhibition in Uganda. Isaac’s presentation was called ‘Hardpans; How breaking hardpans and low-cost farm wells are a key to reaching six SDGs’ and the description of the complementarity of the interventions was very well-received by the delegates.
On the shared exhibition stand, scale models of SMARTechs such as a rope pump, a solar pump and a water filter were presented. The approach demonstrated that MetaMeta and Tiyeni are natural partners with a clear rationale for working together to maximise the benefit of the rainwater harvesting as part of Deep Bed Farming and the groundwater harvesting done by MetaMeta’s SMART Centres. As a result of the conference, Tiyeni has received requests for follow-up meetings from the Blantyre Water Board, Southern Region Water Board, Lilongwe Water Board and the Central Region Water Board in Malawi as well as the Ugandan National Water and Sewerage Corporation and the CoAlive Foundation in Kenya.
There is more to do. There is huge benefit in Tiyeni and MetaMeta working in partnership and the presentations at the conference demonstrate that the work of the two organisations has a natural synergy. Tiyeni and MetaMeta will continue to work together to promote the combination of rain water harvesting, agriculture and low-cost farm water systems as a promising approach to help make the aims of the SDGs for Poverty, Food, Gender, Water, Work and Climate a reality in rural Africa.
Meet Tiyeni’s new Treasurer, Alan Laverock
Alan is a Chartered Accountant by profession and was the Finance Officer for the Scotland Malawi Partnership. He has been involved with charities working in Malawi since 2008. He is the founder of the Bananabox Trust which supports projects in Northern Malawi and co-convener and treasurer of the Mamie Martin Fund which supports the education of young women and girls in Northern Malawi. We caught up with him to find out more about our newest team member.
You’ve got a lot of experience working with Malawi. Can you tell us a bit about it? How did you first get involved?
A friend and I led a team to Chile to build houses for Habitat for Humanity (HfH). There were certain challenges – a group accidentally visiting a brothel in the belief it was a bar, someone putting a pickaxe through his leg, someone falling over in Valparaiso at 2 am and almost getting deported, that sort of thing – but it was generally a successful trip. So we planned another – no way were we going to Africa or India! Africa and India are life changing.
However, HfH had other ideas and we ended up in Area 49 in Lilongwe. We were taken to visit a slum, hardly a tourist attraction and without the HfH country director, we would have found ourselves in a difficult situation. The chief there decided who got the houses we were building. It was the only place that I’ve been to in Africa where there weren’t smiles on everyone’s faces. Holes in the ground for toilets – cholera every second year. Stalls selling single shoes. It was life changing!
I took early retirement and went north the next time to Livingstonia. Wrote my “business plan” for change. Seventeen years later, still working on it; but I’ve been back every year since (apart from 2020), sometimes twice, even three times a year.
Made loads of great friends, mentored several accountants, formed my own charity (Bananabox Trust) and generally having a great time there.
You’ve got a lot of experience working with Malawi. Can you tell us a bit about it? How did you first get involved?
A friend and I led a team to Chile to build houses for Habitat for Humanity (HfH). There were certain challenges – a group accidentally visiting a brothel in the belief it was a bar, someone putting a pickaxe through his leg, someone falling over in Valparaiso at 2 am and almost getting deported, that sort of thing – but it was generally a successful trip. So we planned another – no way were we going to Africa or India! Africa and India are life changing.
However, HfH had other ideas and we ended up in Area 49 in Lilongwe. We were taken to visit a slum, hardly a tourist attraction and without the HfH country director, we would have found ourselves in a difficult situation. The chief there decided who got the houses we were building. It was the only place that I’ve been to in Africa where there weren’t smiles on everyone’s faces. Holes in the ground for toilets – cholera every second year. Stalls selling single shoes. It was life changing!
I took early retirement and went north the next time to Livingstonia. Wrote my “business plan” for change. Seventeen years later, still working on it; but I’ve been back every year since (apart from 2020), sometimes twice, even three times a year.
Made loads of great friends, mentored several accountants, formed my own charity (Bananabox Trust) and generally having a great time there.
How did you hear about Tiyeni?
Tiyeni turned up at a meeting I was involved in. From 2020 to 2025, I worked as the Finance Officer for the Scotland Malawi Partnership and Tiyeni applied for membership. As an English organisation applying to a Scottish one, you will understand they had several protocols to go through – do you eat haggis, can you play the bagpipes, can you teach Malawians to do the Highland Fling, that sort of thing. Yes, Tiyeni passed!
What attracted you to become our new Treasurer?
I was planning to take retirement from work and my job was advertised in the Scotland Malawi Partnership newsletter. The Tiyeni treasurer’s job was the next one down so I literally went down one place and applied! There are several brilliant synergies between Bananabox and Tiyeni. It just seemed right.
What does being the Treasurer of Tiyeni entail?
Looking after the finances of the UK charity, working with the accountant and others in Malawi to assist them to produce good information at the right time, take that sort of burden off the other trustees so they can do what they are really good at.
How do you think Tiyeni can best use your knowledge of working in Malawi?
Working with Bananabox, we can jointly work with a thousand schools in the north of the country – that’s feeding up to a million meals a year. But it’s also teaching the kids about Deep Bed Farming and through them, reaching their parents. It has the potential to change northern Malawi!
Tiyeni is a new member of the Scotland Malawi Partnership. Why do you think partnerships like this are important?
Sharing ideas, meeting like-minded people, that sort of thing. There’s no copyright in improving life chances so let’s all work together.
What do you like to do when the working day is over?
I watch football (Dundee FC, don’t judge), I read a lot, write children’s books, run charities, cook and live for large chunks of the year in Mzuzu.
Tiyeni turned up at a meeting I was involved in. From 2020 to 2025, I worked as the Finance Officer for the Scotland Malawi Partnership and Tiyeni applied for membership. As an English organisation applying to a Scottish one, you will understand they had several protocols to go through – do you eat haggis, can you play the bagpipes, can you teach Malawians to do the Highland Fling, that sort of thing. Yes, Tiyeni passed!
What attracted you to become our new Treasurer?
I was planning to take retirement from work and my job was advertised in the Scotland Malawi Partnership newsletter. The Tiyeni treasurer’s job was the next one down so I literally went down one place and applied! There are several brilliant synergies between Bananabox and Tiyeni. It just seemed right.
What does being the Treasurer of Tiyeni entail?
Looking after the finances of the UK charity, working with the accountant and others in Malawi to assist them to produce good information at the right time, take that sort of burden off the other trustees so they can do what they are really good at.
How do you think Tiyeni can best use your knowledge of working in Malawi?
Working with Bananabox, we can jointly work with a thousand schools in the north of the country – that’s feeding up to a million meals a year. But it’s also teaching the kids about Deep Bed Farming and through them, reaching their parents. It has the potential to change northern Malawi!
Tiyeni is a new member of the Scotland Malawi Partnership. Why do you think partnerships like this are important?
Sharing ideas, meeting like-minded people, that sort of thing. There’s no copyright in improving life chances so let’s all work together.
What do you like to do when the working day is over?
I watch football (Dundee FC, don’t judge), I read a lot, write children’s books, run charities, cook and live for large chunks of the year in Mzuzu.
Our work is only possible thanks to you, our dedicated supporters. For once, we aren't asking you to donate. Or, at least, not yet. If you would like to support our work, please consider donating during the Green Match Fund week of 22-29 April when the value of your donation will be doubled.