Permaculture and disaster management, an African story
Permaculture design has made huge inroads into Africa in recent years. There were early adopters in the late 80's and early 90's in places like Zimbabwe that I am aware of, but I think it is in the 2000's and into the mobile phone/ Facebook age that it has really started to take off at a youth and grass roots level.
I was invited on a study tour of Eastern Uganda through the Wales for Africa program in 2014. I had helped host a Uganda farmer group on their visit in 2011 to see community gardens here in Wales and was included on a return trip. This visit led to a group of us from Wales going back in 2016 and offering a full PDC over 12 days at a conference centre in Kamuli. We worked with the farmers and teachers we had visited, but we also advertised on Facebook and this connected us to many new names and faces. The PDC turned out to be a huge learning experience for all concerned, and we knew we had to repeat it to build on that experience. Returning in 2017 and with some funding from the Wales Government this time, enough for us to anticipate and plan coming back in 2018 and offering something more ambitious.
We had connected with a very wide range of people and instantly realised there was a huge potential audience and need for permaculture training in East Africa.
I did not have a clear sense of where this was leading, but we set ourselves the objective of working with the keenest and most active of the PDC graduates to build their experience to the level that they could run their own sessions, and ultimately be permaculture teachers and leaders. A training of trainer’s program. as we were developing this we picked up a 6-month contract from the Norwegian Refugee Council to trial the permaculture program in West Nile, Northern Uganda where there are over 1 million refugees, mainly form Southern Sudan. This was a big break for our whole team, a huge challenge but also the opportunity to put into practice what we had been developing. Together as a team we ran another PDC in 2018, this time embedded within a school and for 40 participants and led by African trainers, and from there we prepared to take our learning North and work with our team in the refugee settlement areas.
Refugees entering Northern Uganda are permitted to become settlers, allowed to stay and given a plot on which to build a house and start some basic cultivation to supplement the World Food Program survival rations they are given. This is a remote, underpopulated, and undeveloped region, so whole new communities are growing up there from almost nothing. There is so much to be done in developing and promoting permaculture within these vast settlements, an enormous potential as there are so many people potentially to be engaged with.
This was a pilot programme training 40 community members as trainers, who each had the responsibility of working with at least three other families, passing on their own learning. Team members made regular visits in support of this process and NRC carried this forward, using the trainees from the program they had funded to extend it over the next couple of years. We have yet to do our own follow up on the outcomes of this work and this is something we are now working on, we really want to see and understand the longer term impacts of this work.
Jump to 2020 and supported by a UK educational trust and a Korean charity we had the opportunity to offer a full PDC in a distract of Uganda called Teso. Because of covid, restricted funds, and the need to stop or at least reduce air travel we did this online. Although it was difficult, we did manage to deliver the training remotely, supported in field by the trainees from those earlier courses. The group were able to assemble for 5 days of intensive training, in a place with a demonstration garden team members had spent several months developing in anticipation of the course, and they created designs based on their own plans to bring permaculture to their home communities.
An unexpected and invaluable biproduct from all this activity was that we made the acquaintance of Stella Amuge. Stella came as an intern from Makerere University, Kampala where she was completing a degree in sustainable development, with a specific interest in project evaluation. She wanted field experience and although new to permaculture immediately saw its value and potential. She completed the 2020 PDC and then developed a follow-on evaluation program to do follow up visits on the course participants and to track their progress and the impact of the PDC content on their communities. The results that came back were off the scale and way beyond anything we could have expected. This semi-arid and very rural part of Uganda turned out to be very fertile ground for permaculture to take root, adapt, evolve and find its own form within those communities in Teso sub-region. we have experienced the demonstration of effective leadership and ambition from these communities who have set about transforming themselves by building strong and active local groups.
Spurred on by these insights and experiences Stella enrolled on a master’s program back at Makerere, this time in Disaster Management with a special interest of bringing permaculture design into this area. It makes a lot of sense to me, climate change, irregular weather patterns, resource tensions etc.. a great many people will be required to move, to relocate and become refugees or displaced people, this is a reality already, but it seems inevitable that this will accelerate.
Reinvention is possibly what we might see it as, much of the current infrastructure we have created is either not going to be not fit for purpose at some point in the low energy future, or under water due to rising seas. Change is coming in many ways and we will have to adapt and re-invent to move with that. Permaculture as a design framework, as an ethical framework, is a means for people to come together as communities to face their resource needs and can be the unifying framework to facilitate such a process.
We currently have some support form the Permaculture Association here in Britain to return to West Nile this month to do follow up evaluation led by Stella and Vicky, one of the trainers from the 2018 program. We know anecdotally that much has happened since we were there 5 years ago, but we don’t have any figures or clear picture of how things have unfolded so this will be very interesting. Watch this space for results.
This feels like a vital area for future research and development and pioneers like us who have stumbled into these realms also need to connect to the professional world, and the academic world to be able to share these insights and build on them.
The punch line of this story and the reason for the Self Promotion tag is that I am running a Fundraiser to cover the courses fees for Stella’s masters.
As a mother of three and a full-time student you can imagine things are stretched but the final exams are 10 days away and the biggest barrier forward is these course fees.
Please help if you can, but also join us on the journey, permaculture is a global phenomenon, and it is spreading like wildfire. I need to find another £600 ro make the target and this will be life changing for Stella and the many people she will work with in the future.
We have worked under the name of Sector39 and S39 permaculture during this period, with an ambition to accelerate the uptake and interest in permaculture design around the world. We are keen to share and tell our story so that it can grow and touch many, many more people.
There are many more tales to tell of the spread of permaculture in Africa, communities taking the ideas to heart and making them their own, and long may it continue to spread.
Please help if you can, like and share and all those things, many thanks.