Gardens for Health International

What if doctors could prescribe seeds?

That is the basic premise of what Gardens for Health International is doing in Rwanda, and what we someday hope to do throughout East Africa. 

We partner with local health clinics in Rwanda to bring agriculture into the clinical treatment of malnutrition – so that families not only get the life saving medical intervention their children need in the short term, but they also get the seeds, livestock, education and support they need to feed their children and keep them healthy over the long term.

Physicians at our partner health centers don’t literally hand out chickens and kale seeds, but they do give patients and their families a prescription for our program.

We meet each family where they are, designing a home garden that takes the best of sustainable agriculture and applies it to the real world conditions they live in. We do things like include fertilizer trees – to enrich the soil and improve yields over time – and promote forgotten indigenous vegetables that are rich in nutrients and grow well in local soil.

By broadening the definition of healthcare to include caring for the entire family, and by pushing medical interventions beyond the clinic walls and into kitchen gardens and backyards, we believe that it is possible to end chronic malnutrition. And we are seeing results to back up our approach. 

One year after enrolling in our program, 71% of children we have worked with are at a healthy weight. Their families report that they are eating, on average, between 4 and 9 different types of food each day - food that grew in their own home gardens. 

We currently work in 8 partner health centers, reaching 960 families each year, and helping to ensure that nearly 5000 children have the healthy food they need to grow and thrive.