The Cato Manor Community Health Clinic staff together with academics from UKZN, Dr Gerelene Jagganath (Anthropology, School of Social Sciences) and Prof Shanta Balgobind Singh (Criminology & Forensic Studies, School of Applied Social Sciences) have joined forces in a community garden project for 2022.

Their collaboration includes the involvement of Food & Trees for Africa (a leading organisation in sustainable that focuses on food security) and ENACTUS (UKZN), a student-led platform which empowers communities through entrepreneurship. The key objective of the project is to empower community members who are also patients at the clinic, to grow vegetables and fruit that will impact positively on their nutritional intake.

Food gardens have been shown to have a positive impact on nutritional status, nutrition understanding and behaviour. A nutrition intervention will also help address the management of hypertension and diabetes through lifestyle modification of healthy eating behaviours. Ultimately the skills learnt will be extended to their homestead gardens and farms in the rural areas.

The clinic garden is 100 square meters in size and grows fruit and a range of vegetables (including spinach, mustard herbs, madumbi, carrots, brinjal, butternut, beetroot, lemons, bananas and tomatoes), based on agroecological principles of urban gardening and farming.

Dr Gerelene Jagganath is an ambassador of the global SaveSoil (South Africa) campaign and acts as a community engagement representative for the School of Social Sciences. Her teaching and research interests in the anthropology of food, urban agroecology and sustainable development is directly related to the objectives of the garden project.

Together with Prof Shanta Balgobind Singh, they will continue their collaborative research on crime, migration and gender- based violence in the Cato Manor area.