Generation Next: Maureen Muketha

With her roots in Kajiado County, an arid and pastoral region in Kenya with high rates of malnutrition, 25-year-old Maureen Muketha grew up seeing mothers, faced with food scarcity, forced to make heartbreaking decisions meal by meal about which of their children to prioritize feeding. "I knew this was not the best environment for women and children to grow up in," she says, "so I decided to study nutrition so that I can get a technical point-of-view of how to address malnutrition."

While pursuing her undergraduate degree in nutrition and dietetics, Muketha shared her knowledge with her family members and saw noticeable improvement, inspiring her to reach for a broader audience by founding the organization Tule Vyema, named for the Swahili phrase meaning "let's eat right." Tule Vyema began in 2017 with nutrition classes, quickly expanding with deworming drives for children and a popular vertical garden initiative, which allows women to grow four different types of nutritious and otherwise expensive indigenous vegetables (spider plants, amaranths, cowpeas, and African nightshades) on their own. "The vertical gardens came about as making our nutritional education talks more practical," Muketha explains. "We teach our community members about locally available foods that they can consume so that they can be able to eat balanced and diversified diets."

Tule Vyema directs its programs at women because, in Kenya, they are both traditionally in charge of meals and also more likely to be unemployed. "In African culture, the woman is the one who is in charge of the kitchen, so once she appreciates the importance of eating well, she'll be able to apply that at her household level," says Muketha. "Also, the talkative nature of women, we share a lot of information, whether good or bad, so whatever knowledge you acquire, you will most likely tell it to your friend."

The vertical gardens not only improve food security for their families but also offer them the opportunity to sell the excess produce and earn money for home improvement. The organization walks these women through the entire growth cycle of the gardens, and Muketha is able to witness firsthand the positive changes in their lives. "It is the best feeling ever, and I must say it is one of the things that has kept me and also my colleagues at Tule Vyema going," she says. "Even now in the pastoral communities, the women are getting involved in this and so you find there has been a lot of embrace of the indigenous vegetables. There's now more knowledge among community members about what nutrition is all about, and now the most fulfilling thing for them is sharing their knowledge."

Now pursuing her master's in nutrition and dietetics at Kenyatta University, Muketha not only continues to run Tule Vyema but has also joined the leadership team of the United Nations's Food Systems Summit, which will advocate for nutrition and health worldwide by encouraging youth to pledge to promote change at the ground level in their communities. Even with such a packed schedule, Muketha remains focused on the future of Tule Vyema and hopes to gain access to more financial resources to be able to reach even more women. "Food insecurity is still a challenge that Kenya is facing and we are seeing the vertical gardens are really vital in helping or improving the household food security levels," she says. "The future I see for Tule Vyema women is them positively disrupting the distribution and market value chain, owning or cultivating beyond even four varieties of indigenous vegetables, and being suppliers to the local market—coming together to be able to develop themselves and to become the sole suppliers of indigenous vegetables."

For more information, please visit Facebook.com/TuleVyema. Read this story and many more in print by ordering our inaugural issue here. See the full Generation Next series here.