Reporting on a ‘roving workshop’ on urban gardening in Quezon City, the Philippines

The One CGIAR Resilient Cities project is supporting community farms in Quezon City to diversify the vegetables they grow by introducing new species and varieties, on-farm demonstrations, and training. The International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), local partner of WorldVeg in the Philippines, organized an innovative ‘roving workshop’ on 8-10 July 2024, to present the results of their work to community gardeners and other stakeholders. The ‘roving’ aspect refers to the workshop not being held in one place, with particpants visiting four gardens over two days, to see what each group had achieved, and to hear first hand their experiences.

The workshop included group discussions on how to strengthen the supply and demand for traditional vegetables, and a session when they all tasted and ranked vegetable dishes to identify which most suited local palates.

Organoleptic testing of vegetables during the workshop

The main contribution of the project had been the introduction of more vegetables species and varieties, combined with training on nursery management, seed saving and so on, along with cooking demonstrations. The project has trained 75 gardeners, most of them women, and participants expressed their appreciation of the support they had received. They particularly liked the greater diversity of vegetables and training in nursery management. The Sunnyville Urban Farm, one of the six community farms supported, increased their diversity from about 12 species grown before the project to about 36 species grown now. The introduced species included perennial and semi-perennial vegetables alongside many annual leafy vegetables.

Urban gardening has strong support from the local government in Quezon City, one of 17 cities constituting metropolitan Manila. The city’s mayor identified urban gardening as a key pathway to increasing food security, and the project complemented ‘the joy of urban farming’ initiative (with ‘joy’ also referring to the mayor’s name, Josefina (Joy) Belmonte). This supports urban gardening across the city, such as negotiating access to land for establishing community gardens with private landowners and improving sites to make them suitable for farming.

New terms of reference were also agreed during the workshop, to extend the contract with IIRR until the end of 2024. The International Institute of Rural Reconstruction would like to collaborate more with WorldVeg on home gardens in the Philippines, and in other countries where they have a presence, such as Cambodia and Sri Lanka, and proposals are being prepared.

This work is part of the CGIAR Research Initiative on Resilient Cities, that generates evidence, technologies and capacities that help improve urban food systems and secure equitable job and business opportunities, healthy diets for all, human and environment health, and a reduced carbon footprint. The Initiative has a wide array of demand, innovation, and scaling partners, including universities, national agricultural research and extension institutions, private-sector agrifood enterprises and associations, municipal and national governments, consumer groups, youth groups and other civil society organizations, regional and global city networks, UN organizations and international finance institutions. https://www.cgiar.org/initiative/resilient-cities/

The Resilient Cities Initiative is supported by contributors to the CGIAR Trust Fund (https://www.cgiar.org/funders). The WorldVeg contribution to the project is a collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).