This is a typical African high street. It's busy and it's packed. A lot of these people
have moved from rural locations to look for work in town. When they get here, they do
not have the capabilities to still grow fruit. They don't have the space to grow vegetables.
There's a small charity called Halla who really helped these guys to show them how to grow
fruit and veg and do all those things in really small houses, really small tenements.
I'm just going to go and see what they do and how they do it. I don't know what your
house is like, but mine is substantially different to this. What they've tried to do
is recreate the things that they might have had in a village. Everything that you think
a family could need is going in amazingly small spaces because that's what people have.
They have very, very small spaces in these big urban slums. You've got a myriad of different
things. You've got basic tomato plants, you've got peppers. Steve, what's this one called?
Amaranthus. Amaranthus, there's some spinach down there. This is aloe vera. You've got
cuts and bruises, antiseptics. It's like when they were living in a village, they could
grow their own vegetables. Now they're in town, still capable of doing that.
One of the other aspects of what they do here, Steve's got a fish farm. Actually it's a series
of bread baskets with plants growing in them, with tanks below them. And what they have
is they have fish in these and they pump water up through these channels and then the water
slowly goes back down. The vegetables grow really well because they take all the nutrients
out that the fish have basically pooed into the water. So that nutrient rich water goes
up here, goes into the soils, the plants grow really well and the fish get back a re-ariated
clean water. On the roof of these houses, it's a solar panel. It's really quite small
but it's enough to run a small pump to do the fish. Enough for a bit of electricity for
the evening so they can either work or the kids can read. And having just a small amount
of electricity from your own source, it's fantastic. Simple problem in Africa is clean
drinking water. It's always been a problem. What there is plenty of is water bottles.
They're almost everywhere. Basically you get some water, you stick it in a bottle and you
let the sun do the work. UV light kills all the bacteria and you get perfectly drinkable
water after six hours. It's very simple. It's also very free. If you want a cold beer or
if you, you know, you want your water cold down, you can keep things in this box and
it's basically some sort of charcoal refrigerator. Doesn't actually work off electricity. Pull
water over the top of the charcoal, it evaporates and the change in temperature makes this cool
box. It can lower the temperature by about five degrees. So you can store water in there,
it comes out colder than the natural surrounds, you can keep food in there. I didn't really
know you could do that and it's a clever thing. This is obviously a chicken and they use them
for all sorts of different things. Obviously you get eggs and they eat them once in a while
but really they often use them as currency. They breed chickens. When they've got five
or six, they might give them to the local doctor or something like that in place of
actual money. Bizarrely, the price of this chicken is about 350, 400 Kenyan shillings,
which is exactly the same price as the chicken is in the UK. So, you know, maybe that is
the international price of a chicken for quid. The other thing they do is they make biogas.
Now what you have in Africa is lots of lovely cow dung. So you stick it in a mincer and
you put any vegetable green matter in with it. Grind it up. So basically what you get
is this fantastic green sludge. What you do is you take the mutt we had before, you stick
it in here, it starts to ferment. When it ferments, it makes methane gas. Pipe through
to the house next door to what they cook on. You can get an hour and a half a day of cooking
gas from these tanks, which is amazing. This is Stephen Paul's house. It looks really
hot and quite uncomfortable from the outside, but bizarrely, it's not that hot in here.
They have sort of air conditioning. It's a hole at the bottom. The air circulates, it
comes in, then it goes out through this hole on the top so they get constant airflow. It's
got a little bit of electricity from the solar panel. They've got fish outside. They've got
the vegetables outside. They've got some income from the chickens. And actually, that's all
been sorted out by Halla. Halla have showed them how to do this. They've helped them do
the vegetables. They've showed them how to do the fish. And what I love about this is
incredibly simple, isn't it? It's just the local guys helping the local guys. And for
me, it works.
