Summary
Njeke Joshua Egbe from Cameroon grew up in an orphanage in a poor rural area and firsthand experienced the consequences of malnutrition. This inspired him at a very young age to start setting up food gardens for local orphanages. When the civil unrest started in Cameroon in 2017, he had the idea of using organic farming as a peace-building tool. Upon return from kanthari at the end of 2019, Joshua founded Peace Crops. To date, he worked with many rural affected war communities, orphanages, schools, and other entities to practically carry out agriculture projects. His rehabilitation and correction projects aim to equip displaced orphans and women with the knowledge needed to combat unemployment, hunger, and to stop the ongoing conflict.
Crops as a mean for Peace: PEACE CROPS
“YEAH!! YEAH!! YEAH!! Allez les Blue!! Allez les Blue!! Allez les Blue!!” (Which in French means “Go Blue, go!”). This was what we chanted that night of the world cup soccer finals while driving home on the 12th 0f July 1998 in Cameroon.
We had just had a usual ‘boys-night out’ that included a loving father and his two sons watching the match at a friend’s place. France had won and there was singing and celebrating everywhere on the streets.
On the drive back, my father and I were still talking about the match when suddenly, we were stopped by 3 armed robbers just idling along the street entrance. At that time, I didn’t understand what was going on, but I do remember them asking my dad for money, his watch and other valuables he had on. He complied without resisting while telling them not to harm his children. Suddenly, I heard loud terrifying sounds and saw my father collapse. Only after a while did I realize that it was not a dream. The reality was that my 39-year-old father had been shot 5 times in front of his 8 and 4-year-old sons.
That single incident changed our lives completely. I did not only lose a father but my idol and role model; little did I know how rough the journey ahead of me was going to be. Due to the trauma, I became mute for several years and only started talking fluently when I was 22 years old. Things went from bad to worse when my mother was thrown out of my father’s house and all my father’s property was seized by our paternal uncles. Being left with nothing, our maternal family members decided to take care of my 3 siblings while my mother, a young widow, had to struggle to secure a job in another town to support us. And me? I was seen as a burden. Being mute meant that people would look at me as if I was mad. My grandmother, who was working in an orphanage, felt that it was best for me to live there with her.
The orphanage facility had 2 big sleeping rooms which would serve all 22 children with ages ranging from 0 to 17 years. Though we had electricity back then, water availability was a serious problem. Most days after school, we had to walk 8 km away from the orphanage to get water. We worked in the kitchen, washed dishes, clothes, swept, and took care of the younger ones. I remember how difficult it was to provide food for everyone. There were many days we slept being hungry. On countless occasions, we ate just one meal the entire day. We only went to school if the orphanage could afford our school fees. At school, during parent-teacher day, we observed how all the other parents came to talk to the teachers. We had no one representing us. Despite having all these experiences, I considered myself lucky that I had my grandmother and a mother somewhere to assist me whenever I needed help.
Whenever I was short of food or school fees, I did every menial job just to raise money to support myself. I saw education as the only way to liberation and back then I already felt, as an educated person, I could contribute to the wider community.
Luckily enough, when I was 18 years old, I got an opportunity to be enrolled in a university where I attained my degree in the field of Social and Management Science Geography in 2012. I later enrolled in another university’s national diploma program to study Agriculture and community development. This connected me with many NGOs that were promoting organic agriculture in rural communities in Cameroon. I became aware of how dangerous GMOs and chemical fertilizers were to human health and to the environment. Farmers in our local community were using so many chemicals to grow crops, causing dire health issues and degrading the land quality. My grandmother and my girlfriend became very sick as well and it was all traced back as an after-effect of the chemical-laden food we had been eating all our lives. Still, in the volunteering field, I also understood that in the name of donations, most orphanages are used as dumping grounds for expired food. This really changed my mindset to start advocating for organic farming and promoting environmentally friendly agriculture.
With much knowledge acquired from the field, I opened my own organization, a farm and agricultural business. I became very much involved in both crop cultivation and livestock rearing. The little profits I made from the business enabled me to start helping a few vulnerable orphans in the community. I got the opportunity to employ and train 4 adolescent orphans to work with me on my farm. I also started donating fresh produce to certain orphanages and at the same time, help in paying the school fees of 3 orphans.
Setting up my organization was not easy but my life as a farmer was going on so well until the civil war broke out in Cameroon in 2017. Numerous lives have been lost or displaced. Businesses, properties, farmland have been burnt down, crime waves are on the increase and food insecurity has become a problem.
Many children lost their parents and are now surviving in orphanages. Other adolescent youths are being lured into picking up arms by joining the separationist armed forces to fight against the government. I have been harassed at home on countless occasions by armed men who are either rebels or military. On one of these occasions, my uncle was kidnapped by the rebels and his dead body was returned to us after 5 days. I also witnessed my cousin’s right hand being chopped off by these same rebels. We live in constant fear and regularly experience several days of house arrest in the name of “Ghost Towns”. The government bodies and private organizations that were providing support to some of the orphanages I was helping had to cut off their activities because of the insecurity in my region.
With no external support coming in, these orphanages are finding it difficult to provide for their children’s basic needs with lack of food being the major problem. Having gone through almost the same ordeal of hunger while growing up, I felt so much connected to their fate and I became inspired to set up a social venture that will help orphanages grow their own food, look beyond donations, and ensure their own self-sustainable food production at a very low cost.
While trying to figure out various ways of setting up a social venture, I received a scholarship from kanthari in 2019 to learn how to do all this; it also gave me credibility for further support. kanthari helped me to sharpen my dreams and to set up my social venture known as “Peace Crops”. The project is to help orphanages grow their own food organically and to create a mindset shift on youth victims affected by the civil war in Cameroon by helping them become peace ambassadors for organic farming and the environment.
After returning to Cameroon, it was soon realized that women are equally affected by the crises. The challenges piled up: Corona, and the civil war intensified to the point where I couldn’t return to the area where I wanted to start my organization. Luckily a mentor (Hilary Ndige, founder of CCREAD Cameroon was able to give me office space in his relatively stable village.
And thus started Peace Crops. A training center with an auditorium, poultry farm, and piggery.
To date, almost 400 women and youth have been trained in learning different skills such as food transformations (creating new/improved foods out of locally available ingredients), food preservation and processing, creating organic farms, gardens, and we have been working on the realization of a seed bank.
200 of these beneficiaries have been successful in putting their training into practice. Apart from that, leaders of different NGOs have been given training in project planning, finance, and other tools essential for them. 14 orphanages now have organic gardens that they can rely on to cut their food costs. There was even a prison project where 10 prisoners were trained to work on an organic farm to provide the prison with nutritious food. Unfortunately, the pandemic added quite some additional problems. Even though other challenges such as the intensifying civil war, threats to my life, and hesitancy of beneficiaries to discontinue the use of pesticides, the work went on and was even recognized by the Global Changers Recouping Award, and The Young Global Changer 2022.
The most important learning for me was to build trust with donors through transparent reports, regular and timely communication. Donors can be hard to come by especially in war-torn regions, but some donors have even donated multiple times due to their trust in us.
Currently, I am in kanthari for the Business and social change (BASCH) program that was added to the Curriculum only last year. It will help me to continue the work and to increase Peace Crops’ impact in Cameroon.
