On a tiny urban smallholding in Kenya, the Huruma Town Youth Group tend goats and chickens and grow vegetables – sharing their bounty with the community’s most vulnerable

In a space of less than an eighth of an acre in Huruma, a small informal settlement in north-east Nairobi, is a tiny farm housing 19 goats and 286 birds – chickens, doves and guineafowl.

Pens and cages have been cobbled together with discarded wood and corrugated iron. Goats hop from a pen curious to see their new visitors, passing day-old chicks who squeak from inside a cage. There’s a goat skin drying out in the sun as a bunch of flies swarm above it.

Moments of calm can only be found inside the group’s office, where a small goat sits quietly under a chair. Her name is Olivia, and she is blind.

This farm, as small and chaotic as it is, is a lifeline for Kevin Uduny and the rest of the Huruma Town Youth Group (HTYG) who manage it. Uduny and four others co-founded the group a decade ago to get away from the problems of unemployment and poverty in the slum. This small plot was once wasteland, a spot for young people to hide and take drugs, Uduny says.

They began by keeping chickens, and in 2014 acquired three dairy goats through a grant from a government initiative to help eradicate food poverty in slums. The project (though not the size of the farm) has grown from there. Now, eight members of the youth group work here, along with young kids from the area who volunteer.

Urban farming has become a vital resource for Kenyans living in areas with high levels of food insecurity. Almost half of Nairobi’s citizens are malnourished, and an estimated 73% of Nairobi’s slum population live below the poverty line.

“As a young person I regret being born in Kenya. Huruma is tough, we struggle to live. Young people are dying,” Uduny says, referring to the poverty and violence that plague these informal settlements.

“We help ourselves. We want to empower the community so the young people can grow, but we need to feed ourselves first. That’s number one.”

Silvester Odhiambo, who goes by the name of Silver, has been farming with Uduny for five years. He’s just 23 and wears green overalls and boots, but his youthful energy is masked by a look of stern maturity. He’s relied on backyard farming since childhood; when he struggled to get fees together for school, he planted kale and reared poultry to sell.

Silver believes farming in cities can help get a lot of people out of poverty. “Whenever I was sent for school fees, I could sell the animals and I saw that it has good benefits. The population is rising, and people have to eat.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Huruma Town Youth Group grows vegetables in the slum as well as keeping livestock

Kenya has always been a nation of small-scale farmers. Almost 2 million urban and peri-urban households keep livestock, and the numbers are predicted to increase to 6 million by 2050. In Nairobi itself, there were an estimated 23,000 heads of cattle in the 1980s – and numbers are expected to be far larger now.

At another small-scale backyard farm in the east of the city, Francis Wachira is stepping out of his house among the ramshackle shanties of Maringo estate. He’s wearing a white lab coat, and the skin on his hands is tough after years of agricultural work. “If people can embrace this, start growing their own in their backyard, then we can feed ourselves, we can feed people in the city, and the surplus we can take to the rural area,” he says.

Wachira has been growing vegetables and rearing animals here for almost 20 years. His large plot is on disused land he took over, where he grows all kinds of vegetables. “Anything people give me I try. Where are my seeds from England?” he asks. The room of about 3 metres by 5 metres holds 30 goats and another slightly larger room holds 500 rabbits.

Wachira calls himself the rabbit king: he’s one of the leading rabbit farmers in Nairobi and has built an extensive business here, selling meat to hotels and local shops.

In his eyes, agriculture and livestock farming can solve Nairobi’s food problems.

“Whatever they’re producing they feed themselves and they feed their community around them. This is something that should be embraced.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Silvester feeding some of the 286 birds on the farm

In recent years the county government has begun to acknowledge the importance of urban farming for the city’s poorer population. In 2015 the Nairobi City County established the Urban Agriculture Promotion and Regulation Act, a framework that supports urban farming as a way to improve food security.

“In the past urban agriculture started off as being seen as ridiculous, poverty oriented. Something that should be looked down upon and got rid of as dirty and dangerous,” says Diana Lee-Smith, co-founder of the Mazingira Institute, which has built a network of urban farmers in the city. “That’s starting to change with these new institutional changes.”

The size and conditions in city farms, particularly in slums, undoubtedly brings in questions of safety. Most are known not to adopt adequate biosecurity and waste management practices, according to the FAO. Living in close proximity to animals risks the spread of disease. Vaccination coverage across the country is also low, but the Nairobi county act will attempt to regulate these issues – sustainable crop and livestock production, animal welfare, and hygiene and sanitation standards.

There also seems to be a growing awareness among the farmers themselves. The Huruma farmers and Wachira have a vet they use regularly to vaccinate the animals, and they try to be sustainable by making their own compost using animal manure and leftover vegetables, leaving it to dry out in the sun for a few weeks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Young people from Huruma volunteer to work on the farm

“Small crop livestock farms are the most efficient ecological food production units,” argues Lee-Smith. “The livestock consume the fresh waste [in the form of vegetables], then the rest is composted, and that’s used on the crop farm, so then the crops again produce and the crop waste gets used again for animals. It’s a complete cycle.”

Some research has even disputed the disease risk in urban farms. In a study based in Dagoretti, Nairobi, where one in 80 households keep cattle, non-dairy households were more likely to report diarrhoeal disease than neighbours who kept livestock. Researchers suggested that the benefits of improved nutrition outweigh the risks of disease exposure in keeping livestock.

Back in Huruma, at three in the afternoon when the heat of the midday sun has dispersed, Uduny calls Tin Tin over for milking. All the female goats are named. There’s Obama, Ida and Silver – the grumpy goat that only the human Silver is able to control. Tin Tin shares the name of Uduny’s grandmother, who raised him and his sister after his parents died when he was still in junior school.

“[Tin Tin] really brings a lot of milk,” he says smiling. “I started farming when I was a kid even before my mum passed. She told me one thing: in the future you’re going to be a good farmer. So I tend to think that’s a blessing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uduny milks one of the goats

He feels lucky, but life working on the farm is still hard. The farmers earn less than one dollar a day as production is still low. In Nairobi the legal minimum wage for casual labourers and domestic workers is now about $6 a day. The goats, all 19 of them, are fed on leftover vegetables that they find at the end of the market day as they can’t afford proper feed, but this isn’t nutritious enough for them to produce a lot of milk.

They sell one litre of goat’s milk for 100 Kenyan shillings (75p), and a tray of (about 30) eggs will go for 500 shillings. But before they can sell anything, they need to feed themselves and vulnerable people in the community.

The farmers fill their diets with milk and eggs, and any vegetables they can grow in the slum. “When we have a goat we slaughter, we share with the community.

“We can’t satisfy all the customers. We are concentrating on a small space which is also a challenge. We can’t sustain everyone with this small space.”

But, he adds, “At least we get something small. It’s a hand-to-mouth initiative. At the end of the day, you have kids relying on you, and you have personal issues. It’s difficult but we hope God will lift us.”