City Shamba is a Nairobi-based agribusiness social enterprise that champions sustainable urban farming. Its name combines "City" (representing the urban environment) and "Shamba" (the Swahili word for farm). Essentially, it transforms underutilized urban spaces—rooftops, balconies, small backyards, and even walls—into productive, green areas for growing food.

Primary Mission and Vision
City Shamba's mission extends beyond just growing food. It is driven by several interconnected goals:

Enhancing Food Security: To increase access to fresh, nutritious, and hyper-local food right in the city, reducing reliance on long supply chains.
Promoting Sustainability: To advocate for eco-friendly practices like composting, rainwater harvesting, and organic farming, reducing the carbon footprint of food.
Improving Urban Livelihoods: To create green jobs, offer training, and provide income-generating opportunities, especially for youth and women in informal settlements.
Transforming Urban Ecosystems: To make cities greener, reduce the urban heat island effect, improve air quality, and promote biodiversity.
Key Activities and Services
City Shamba operates through a multifaceted model:

1. Design, Installation, and Maintenance of Urban Farms:

Rooftop Gardens: They convert flat rooftops of homes, apartments, offices, and schools into vegetable gardens using container gardening or raised bed techniques.
Vertical/Sack Gardens: A signature solution for spaces with extremely limited ground space. They use multi-story sacks or wall-mounted systems to grow vegetables vertically. This is especially popular in densely populated informal settlements like Kibera and Mathare.
Balcony Gardens: Optimizing small apartment balconies for food production.
Institutional Gardens: Setting up farms for schools, hotels, and corporate offices for educational purposes and on-site food supply.
2. Training and Capacity Building (A Core Pillar):

They run extensive workshops and hands-on training programs for individuals, community groups, and institutions.
Topics include: basic urban farming techniques, organic pest management, seed saving, composting (making compost from kitchen waste), and water-saving irrigation (like drip irrigation).
This empowers people to start and maintain their own gardens, fostering self-reliance.
3. Production and Sale of Agricultural Inputs:

They produce and sell affordable, high-quality inputs tailored for urban settings:

Organic seedlings of vegetables (kale/spinach/sukuma wiki, tomatoes, onions, etc.).
Organic fertilizers and pest control solutions.
Prepared growing sacks and modular gardening kits for easy startup.
4. Social Impact and Community Projects:

City Shamba actively works in slum upgrading programs. They train residents of informal settlements to grow food in sacks, creating household nutrition and potential surplus for sale.
They engage in school gardening programs, teaching children about nutrition, agriculture, and environmental stewardship from a young age.
They often partner with NGOs, government agencies, and international organizations (like UN-Habitat) on specific urban resilience and food security projects.
Why City Shamba is Significant (The "Elaborate" Impact)
Addressing the Rural-Urban Divide: In a country where agriculture is often seen as a rural activity, City Shamba brings it into the heart of the city, changing mindsets and utilizing idle spaces.
Climate Resilience: Their model promotes water conservation (through drip irrigation and rainwater harvesting) and waste reduction (through composting), making cities more adaptable to climate change.
Nutrition and Health: By enabling families to grow their own vegetables, they directly combat malnutrition and diet-related diseases by providing a constant supply of vitamins and minerals.
Economic Empowerment: Urban farming can become a micro-enterprise. Individuals can sell surplus produce to neighbors, creating a circular economy within the community. The skills training also enhances employability in the green economy.
Psychological and Social Benefits: Gardening in cities provides therapeutic benefits, reduces stress, builds community cohesion as people share knowledge and harvests, and beautifies otherwise concrete-dominated environments.

Company Size: 1-10 employees