We had a wonderful visit from and organization called ‘E3′ (Educate, Empower, Employ). This is a faith-based group that works in the Dowa District of Malawi, primarily in a community called ‘Gusu’, to “help create ways to stimulate the local economy; build and use local assets which are then leveraged for greater and fairer market participation.”
This group received training in Permaculture Design several years ago and are now using these principles and ideas to address issues of food security, health, education, and economic development. For this visit, E3 brought about 35 participants which included local farmers, members of local community groups, and project staff.
We are fortunate enough to currently have three interns at Never Ending Food (Emmanuel, Chiku, and Kusala) who can now give entire tours in English or Chichewa. They decided to divided the large group into three smaller groups and spent the morning teaching about Permaculture Designs. Their tours exposed the groups to concepts of: Permaculture guilds and zones, water harvesting, nutrition, compost making, worm farming, fish farming, animal management, bee keeping, tree planting, mulching, Malawi’s 6 food groups, composting toilets, diversified staple field production, solar drying, fuel efficient stoves, the importance of using local resources, and much more!
Never Ending Food has recently received a donation of money from a group in Canada, which the interns are planning to use to take a group of local women farmers to visit the E3 project in the near future. This ‘idea sharing’ fits in nicely with Permaculture’s third ethic of ‘Fair Share’ and helps to promote the implementation and uptake of ecologically sustainable ideas.
A big thanks to E3 for arranging the visit and to our three hard-working interns for the work they put into making the day a success!
