OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership

Hello! I’m Newlove Bobson Atiso from Kpome Village, du Zio prefecture, Togo, West Africa, standing in one of our small farms. I serve as the OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership’s national leader in Togo(1). Together with 280 dedicated small-holder farmers, we form Interfaith Peacemaking Teams (IPTs) to solve our local challenges. We are a grassroots network of community leaders and farmer families from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds working together to overcome poverty, hunger, and climate hardship. We build peace through our common visions and mutual actions. Through OMNIA Institute’s training and guidance, we’ve learned how to build power from within and develop practical solutions for our future and especially the future or our children. Our 2025-2026 goal and need are to grow more cassava and process it by ourselves into nutritious and sellable flour, which we call gari.

Families that do not grow their own cassava will purchase it in local markets, so the demand for this food is always high. Sometimes it can be too expensive to purchase in sufficient quantities for poor families, particularly with children to feed. So, growing and processing our own is very helpful for our children’s nutrition.

Planting cassava by hand is also very hard work.

Meet Our Farmers

Please meet Madame AFANOU Afiwa, one of our inspiring team leaders, who guides four Interfaith Peacemaking Teams, which unite four cassava, small-farming communities.

Madame Afi Afanou was born in the year 1975 at a village called Gafe in the Prefecture of Zio in the Republic of Togo. She started basic education in 1980 but stopped in 1986 because of the many challenges going to school due to lack of support.

She joined her aunti in Lome to help with her business. At the age of 20, she decided to learn cloth and dress making so went through the apprenticeship for 5 years and qualified as a professional seamstress. She is a married woman with 6 children.

After joining and going through community-organizers training conducted in Togo by Rev. Abare and Dr. Shanta of the OMNIA Institute, she decided to move to Kpome to start her IPT's. The teams there are engaged in farming and gari processing activities.

Her leadership has brought together dozens of women farmers, empowering them to collaborate, share resources, and strengthen their families’ food security and income through cooperative action. All of these constructive interactions are wonderful for reconciliation and peace-making. They represents the strength, experience, inspiration, love, and commitment of the women farmers leading our initiatives.

Paraphrasing Madame Afanou’s own words, ‘This cassava is beautiful, isn’t it? Yes, it is hard to dig-up and harvest, but I don’t mind. It’s for my family. I will make gari from it, mostly for my family. It is delicious to us and farming, harvesting, and processing by hand is one of my purposes, so I do it with gratitude. I can make income from the gari, too, and then pay my children’s school and book fees. When I make more gari, I can earn more money for my family’.

Our Challenge

Here is a link to a short video where Newlove shows the cassava that the IPT planted last year after one of their OMNIA trainings. There have been unusual drought conditions, but the cassava is okay; however, the maize is not flowering, and the peanuts are not growing well without sufficient rain.

As subsistence farmers, we primarily grow cassava, maize, and groundnuts. It is hard to plant crops by hand. However, climate change has made rainfall unreliable, and the dry season is now longer. Crops fail more often, and our harvests are shrinking. We continue to use traditional hand-processing techniques to make cassava flour called gari, which is time-consuming and often leads to hand injuries. The burden falls most heavily on women and girls. Without new tools, we can only produce small amounts for personal use.

Here is another wonderful aspect of our work. Togo is one of the African countries that are composed of three main religions which include Christians, Muslims, and Traditional. In the past, the people practicing these different religions did not have good relations based on their different backgrounds. Even though there have not been any conflicts that arise from their religious differences, there were difficulties in cohabiting. But since OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership1 started creating Interfaith Peacemaking Teams in various communities, they are all understanding that they are one people irrespective of their religious backgrounds. They can come together to solve urgent, relevant and winnable issues that confront their communities. Working together on projects like gari production joins people together, differences are less important, and the communities become empowered.

Our Solution

Here are a few pictures of our training work. OMNIA Institute Director, Shanta Premawardhana, and Newlove (with his daughter) are preparing for training and scenes from two Interfaith Training sessions.

We decided the best path for us is to purchase cassava processing equipment so we can:

Already, we’ve organized farmers, identified trusted suppliers, and secured a shared community space to house the equipment. We are ready to pick up the equipment by truck and start this part of our future once the purchases are made.

How We Will Use Your Donations - Budget Table in purchasing order

Item Description and Cost:

Total $23,101.

Cassava grater, squeezer, and roaster that we selected for our Kpome small-holder farmers.

Your donations will fund the equipment, materials, and setup needed to bring this solution to life.

We will purchase the equipment from suppliers in neighboring Nigeria as the funds become available and pick-up everything by ourselves.

Why It Matters

Interfaith Peacemaking Team of small-holder farmers working together to prepare cassava into gari flour for their homes all by hand.

Imagine what it means for a small-farm family to finally sell their products, afford school fees for their children, and feed their families with dignity. Picture the joy and pride when we roast our first large batch of gari using equipment funded by people like you who believe in us. We are not asking for charity, we are building a sustainable partnership.

For our IPT farmers:

We can sell our gari at local markets.

A Special Thank You

Our thank you card from all of us.

As OMNIA’s national leader in Togo, I personally celebrate each donor. We are creating thank-you cards to send to you.

How You Can Help

Please donate and share our story with your networks. Together, we can fight hunger, adapt to climate change, and build opportunities for our children for generations.

Learn about us here: https://www.omnialeadership.org/

(1) OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership is our leadership and fiscal sponsor. They will manage all donations, ensure responsible distribution of resources, and maintain transparent records of all project activities to uphold donor trust and accountability. You can reach OMNIA by email posted on their website.

This GoFundMe document was created by Thomas ODonnell, PhD, a volunteer for OMNIA, and Newlove Bobson Atiso, the OMNIA national leader in Togo with assistance from AI.