Chido Govera - This is my story

Chido Govera History

Chido Govera is an admirable and dynamic young lady from Zimbabwe. She is in her mid-twenties and has committed herself to fighting poverty and malnutrition in the Southern hemisphere of the planet.

From her childhood on, after the death of her mother at the age of seven, Chido had to live the hardship of poverty, hunger and abuse. At such short age she already had to face the situation of being head of a family and take care of her grandmother and brother. Chido learned from her grandmother how important it is to know about nature and its cycles. She joined her in collecting mushrooms during the rainy season, which were essential to feed the small family. As is the case of most African orphans, her relatives were unable to support their daily struggle for survival.

But Chido was lucky. At the age of 11 she was elected one of 15 orphans to participate in a fungiculture project financed by ZERI Foundation  and realized by the Africa University in Mutare.

There she learned how to use agricultural waste to grow mushrooms and provide food for herself and her family. By selling the mushrooms she could even pay the fee to send her brother and other orphans to school and thus set an important basis for a more positive future for them. Seeing how her new knowledge had changed the life of her family and the few orphans that she was able to help, Chido decided to continue working with mushrooms and simplifying the process in order to teach it to more people.

By now Chido has taught mushroom cultivation to several hundreds of people, among them women from India, orphans from Colombia and Zimbabwe, Tanzania, South Africa, the Congo, Holland and even students from the US. She has shown them how to produce high quality edible mushrooms as a meat substitute for a rich and healthy nutrition, thus contributing to their self-supply through the conversion of waste to food.

In 2009, Chido Govera was awarded the „Sustainability Award“ by the „Specialty Coffee Assocation of America“ for her sustainable project of reusing organic waste from the coffee industry to cultivate mushrooms.