Vision Fund

Keeping the drought out

Drought is a silent emergency. In humanitarian language we call it slow onset. Unlike floods or landslides or a hurricane or a tsunami that rushes in loud and forceful, leaving destruction visible within minutes, drought creeps in slowly and silently, invisible at first glance.

Because the impact of the drought is slow, people keep getting used to it until it’s too late. The damage a drought leaves takes a long time to recover.

World Vision’s Programme Coordinator Ajith Prasanna found a way to fight the drought. Ajith studied the techniques of Integrated Resource Management (IRM) for agriculture and Analogue Forestry and began to find methods that can be used in communities combining their traditional methods. He built the concept of the Food Forest Garden.

Ajith worked with farmers with a minimum 1.5 acres of land. 0.5 acres of the land was used to build a rainwater harvesting tank and a natural water protection area around it, in order to retail rainwater and to support the increase and the maintaining of the ground water level.

A ¼ of an acre was used for a fully organic ‘resilient garden’ – a well-structured cultivation plot. From the east to the west of the land the trees were planted from the tallest to the shortest. It not only controlled the impact of the sun on the ground, but also organized the direction of the wind and the amount of water carried by it.

The Food Forest Garden became a green fortress, keeping the drought out of the land and the homes. It retains ground water levels, the cooling in the air and supports the functions of the microorganisms.

LANKA