When Faith Mukami John (Class of 2015, Kenya) finished high school and had to choose a career, people around her were surprised: in the context she came from, it was rare to hear a young person say enthusiastically that her passion was agriculture. Faith had witnessed the shortcomings of farmers in making their crops efficient and sustainable, and since then, she wanted to do something about it.
She got to know about EARTH thanks to one of her teachers at high school. She decided to apply and was accepted. A few months later, she moved to Costa Rica to be part of the Class of 2015. As a student, her main interest was to better understand the repercussions that climate change has on the world. She wanted not only to understand it, but to look for real solutions, mainly for the daily problems that farmers in her country were facing on a daily basis.
When she returned to Kenya, she worked for several years at EcoFuels, a company working on optimizing a sustainable supply chain and transforming croton nuts into sustainable energy and organic products. Faith was in charge of training more than 1000 smallholder farmers in organic farming.
Since 2020 she has been working alongside Green Earth Climate Action (GECA), an organization that emerged to respond to some of the main causes of climate change, such as deforestation and land misuse. On the other hand, together with other people from her community, Faith created Arthi Njema Agroforestry, a community-based organization that seeks to train farmers in resilience and adaptation to climate change. The organization is supported by GECA and their work is connected. So far, Faith has trained 700 farmers and has managed to plant more than 70,000 trees from both efforts.
These trees are native species and have been planted in semi-arid areas that have been highly affected by climate change. Faith has worked hard to implement agroforestry systems that allow soil restoration, and the use of good agricultural practices in order to make crop production grow in a sustainable manner.
“Right now, I do what I am passionate about: I wanted to work alongside farmers, I dreamed of helping them to make their crops and practices more efficient. Since I graduated, I have done this, I have worked for six years training hundreds of people and I have started to see the results of my efforts,” she says. To increase her own knowledge, Faith is taking, virtually, a Masters in Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh.
“I’m always looking to learn new things and to have more tools for my individual growth. I believe that the education I received at EARTH is the foundation of who I am as a person and as a professional. The knowledge I gained as a student has allowed me to guide others, because at EARTH I learned about the global problems generated by climate change and at the same time, about the solutions we can generate to make a change,” she says proudly.
If you want to support Faith so her work can impact more farmers, please contact her at feimukami75@gmail.com