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Backyard Farms is a new South African social enterprise created to uplift the lives of township women via micro-farming and entrepreneurship opportunities.
Put simply, we find women with unused backyards and provide them with compost, fertilizer, chilli plants and basic training to turn them into little chilli farms. We then buy those chillies, and use them for the production of our new sauce range called “Backyard Farms”. The more sauce we sell, the more chillies we buy- growing the network of little farms that we can support. These sauces will also be sold by our ‘farmers’ back into their communities, increasing the money they can earn from this venture.
And we’re not stopping with just chillies – we have plans for other herbs and veggies that will increase the earning power for our partners and help us grow the range of our sauces.
A LITTLE BACKYARD FARMS HISTORY
Backyard Farms is something good to come from the bad of the 2020 Global Covid 19 lockdown. Having spent most of 2020 running an emergency feeding project for many thousands of people within the townships and communities of the Western Cape, Dom (our founder) became acutely aware that handing out free food was neither sustainable nor empowering.
So, after lots of chatting and drinking tea with the community members, a social enterprise was formed with the sole intention of creating a sustainable business model for the upliftment of women in the townships. We wanted to combine our respective skills, experiences and resources to create an organisation that can grow and improve the lives of everyone involved.
THE TEAM
Dom and Leila are running the day-to-day operations of Backyard Farms, with all of the images, videos and stories being captured by Anna from www.madeinmycamera.co.za – who also happens to be Dom’s wife!
Dom has a corporate and entrepreneurial background in the food and hospitality sectors and Leila is a food technologist with experience both in corporate South Africa and start-ups in Taiwan!
