About YARD

Youth Action for Rural Development (YARD) is an integrated Community based organization (CBO) based in Gatanga sub-county in Muranga county, formerly Gatanga district in the central province of Kenya.  The organization is a dream come true for Mr. Wambugu, who is the founder and the program manager up to date.  In 1998, he had a vision and desire to work with members of the community towards creating sustainable lives. The dream was later translated to a reality in the year 2002 making YARD operative for the last thirteen years with massive transformation of many community lives for the better.  Our offices are located  at upper Kirwara  400 metres from Kirwara shopping centre on your way to Gatura.

The area has, like in the most part of the country have been heavily hit by social economic challenges like HIV/AIDS, unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse.  The AIDs coordinator office in the sub county has reported that the prevalence rates of HIV/AIDs has decreased from 32% to 8%  in the last 8 years. Though positive the effect of  the scourge are being highly felt as many of the children have either been left as orphans and thus household heads or have become vulnerable to poverty and poor nutrition due to the family bread winner being too weak to feed for their homes.

The food security status of Gatanga is under threat due to the declining land fertility and increasing poverty rate especially in Kakuzi, the drier part of the sub county.  This is evidenced by the meal patterns  in the area.  After baseline survey  of the area which was done by YARD it was established that 46.2% of the household have an average of 2 meals a day with majority skipping breakfast, 50.15% have an average of 3 meals and 4.87% eat once a day.  The coping strategies employed to dealing with food insecurity include relying on less preferred foods, decreasing the food portion sizes, restricting adults for the children to eat, borrowing and purchasing food on credit hence a lot of community development work is needed.