Fatima Mkwate, 42, picks mustard greens to include in the porridge she’ll prepare for her six children. Photo by Sara A. Fajardo/CRS

A project spearheaded by Catholic Relief Services is featured today in New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s blog.

The WALA project (which means to shine in Chichewa, an indigenous language of Malawi) helps communities build their resilience to recurrent drought  by: teaching conservation agriculture techniques to help farmers produce crops even in drought conditions,providing small scale irrigation to enable a second harvest and diminish dependence on rainfall,  linking small-scale farmers to markets such as the chilies mentioned in the article, and working with women to make use of highly nutritious and locally available foods such as ground nuts to boost the nutrition of their families.

The WALA consortium is made possible through the generous funding of the American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development. CRS leads eight partners in the implementation and planning of WALA. Currently more than 166,000 families are benefitting from this project.