Proverbs 14:23 says “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” Faidon is a Malawian man who has embraced this principle perfectly. Like the majority of Malawians, Faidon and his family rely on subsistence farming, which is farming for you and your household’s food. The staple food in Malawi is Nsima. It is made using corn flour, so all the farmers plant corn annually during the rainy season because that’s the only way they can irrigate their crops effectively.
Unfortunately, the rain is not consistent each year, and sometimes, it’s not enough to grow the corn needed to survive. Fertilizer can be used, though, to add nutrients to the soil so that the crops can survive during such times. The government recognizes this problem and issues out bags of fertilizer to farmers through farm input subsidies. But oftentimes, the fertilizer is made available too late into the rainy season and the farmers are left with a loss in their potential harvest.
Faidon was affected by this problem and took it into his own hands to solve it. Through the Economic Empowerment Program that Y-Malawi runs, Faidon was taught how to make his own fertilizer so that he could use it during the right time and ultimately help his crops grow better. Thanks to this program, Faidon and his family now have a better chance of harvesting more corn annually and can thus feed themselves throughout the year. Instead of complaining about the lack of effectiveness in the systems that were supposed to help him, Faidon took initiative and used the knowledge he gained from Y-Malawi to resolve the issue.