The Future of Hope

Chido Govero, never knew her father and witnessed her mother die from AIDS. At the age of seven she become the head of a small family nucleus, with her younger brother and blind grandmother. Her uncle and cousin abused her, “the price girls have to pay to have a shelter at a family’s plot of land”, she asserts is rather the rule than the exception. At the age of 12 she learned how to farm mushrooms, converting leaves, dead tree branches, water hyacinth, coffee pulp and corncobs into a substrate. Chido is believed to have “green” fingers, farming more mushrooms on less substrate than anyone else. She is on a crusade under the program “Orphan Teaches Orphans” convinced that the only way girls can escape abuse is when they know how to provide for their own food security. By April 2009 Chido has trained her first dozen assistants and she is determined to reach out and network throughout Africa to create millions of jobs and to stamp hunger out of the continent with what is locally available.