ASIA/KAZAKHSTAN - Caritas launches sustainable agriculture project: it will provide livelihood and professional training

Friday, 14 June 2019 caritas   sustainable development   farmers   solidarity   development  

Almaty (Agenzia Fides) - "The construction of the two greenhouses in Almaty and Talgar has been completed. This means that we are about to start the operational phase of the sustainable agriculture project. The first aspect to be addressed is the organization of the work to sell agricultural products. In fact, if part of the production is used to support people assisted by Caritas, the proceeds from the remaining sales will be used to support our other projects. All this will lead us to seek employees who take care of the packaging and product distribution. Another important aspect is that we have in mind is the possibility of using greenhouses as a location to carry out training courses. To this end, an important collaboration was launched with Caritas India to collaborate in the exchange of knowledge and skills in the field of agriculture". This is what Caritas Almaty reports in a note sent to Agenzia Fides, illustrating the developments of the sustainable agriculture project carried out in the former Kazakh capital and in the nearby city of Talgar.
To give impetus to the initiative, a training workshop was organized in Indonesia in June 2018 by Caritas Asia. The experience is defined as "significant, despite its simplicity. Although the economic and social conditions of our respective countries are significantly different, many features of those projects are applicable in our rural sites".
The establishment of greenhouses is also the follow-up to the awareness-raising work started two years ago with the Expo of Astana: "It is the ideal continuation, at a local level, of the message spread inside the Vatican pavilion, namely that it is possible to use resources that nature provides us with as a common good, so that energy is for everyone. And that it can represent not only a means of subsistence, but also a place of education with which to learn new cultivation technologies and therefore acquire skills in the workplace".
Training and the development of professional skills represent a priority for Caritas in Kazakhstan, which in recent years has activated, among other projects, an initiative aimed at bringing people with Down syndrome and a series of online English language courses into the world of work. (LF) (Agenzia Fides, 14/6/2019)


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