The Challenges and Rewards of Implementing Permaculture in Ethiopia

Editor’s Note: This is the most pleasureable part of my work – seeing people soaking up permaculture goodness, being empowered by it, and benefitting from their labours. Alex gives us a great update on his selfless labours in Ethiopia – nicely loaded with documentary images. If you appreciate the work Alex is doing, and haven’t yet taken your Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course, you might want to consider studying in Ethiopia – so your course fees will help fuel the juggernaut project described below even further. The August 02 – 12, 2010 course will be particularly relevant to you if you live in a semi-arid climate zone.

Our international PDCs use the schools’ project in its learning exercises;
Participants act as judges for our schools’ competitions. This both helps to
motivate the schools (prizes for best school, best parent, best child and best
teacher are awarded bi-annually) and is a learning exercise for the
international participants.

Tichafa, our facilitator/consultant, trainer for ReSCOPE – 15 years experience around southern Africa

In much of Africa, environmental problems and rural depravation are closely tied together. The rural poor lack access to education which means they have no chance to earn better incomes. Stuck in a poverty trap, they often resort to practices which degrade the very environment that supports them; clearing indigenous woodland to make charcoal, overstocking animals, or planting harmful species which give fast cash rewards such as Eucalyptus and so on. Population growth, of course, worsens all this. As a result land is wrecked and won’t produce enough food to feed them.

In the case of Ethiopia we are all familiar with the dust bowl image and the starving kids. Geldof’s Live-Aid was supposed to put an end to all that in the 80’s, but 30 years on many communities there are still reliant on handouts. In fact it’s the same in much of Africa. Why? It’s not that the land does not have the capacity to produce the food. There are many places on earth which are less productive but people manage to grow what they need. It’s not that the people are lazy either. Women especially, live a life of constant toil and drudgery in many areas of the continent.

Rainwater is harvested from all roof tops on our service buildings
–photo shows gutters from restaurant and kitchen taking water into a 1000 litre
plastic tank which is situated at the top corner of our zone 1 vegetable gardens.

So, how can communities sustainably manage their land, producing from it while respecting the function of the ecological processes which allow that production? Permaculture is the answer. But in Africa there are a different set of challenges to overcome in getting communities to implement PC on the ground than are faced in the rest of the world.

Firstly there is the lack of education. If people cannot understand you, how do you get concepts across to them? Uneducated people often lack the ability to challenge their own assumptions. If you ask them why they use a particular practice, you will often get the reply “we do it this way here”. To some extent that may be a sign that it works – if their grandfathers did it, it must work. The problem is that there is generally a far greater population than there was two generations ago – and what may have been both productive and sustainable then, may not be now, when there are 10 times as many people. To add to this, a certain scepticism of the “new fangled” has crept into many communities, as they have time and again been duped with new "wonder" products from bio-tech companies seeking to rip them off, and quite rightly too.

The drip irrigation which is fed by the same tank (it is also filled from
the mains when there is no rain).

Other challenges are the lack of technology, infrastructure and communications. It is often said that PC is information intensive. If there is no internet access, even no books available, how do we access information to learn more about the elements of our system? Similarly without the high tech equipment we have in the west, how do we develop the systems that are implemented in the west?

Another challenge is the lack of capital. When most people are on the bread line how are they going to get in a load of new equipment to start implementing new systems of production? There certainly are funds out there. Many organisations are pouring millions of dollars into Africa each year. But funders have motives of their own and conditions that go with them, as Andy Homer from a project in Morocco recently noted. It will soon become clear to anybody who goes deeper into the aid game that developing community independence is not really what it’s all about. Much of the time the charitable foundations are set up by businesses, who donate their profits to avoid tax. However the foundation will then give the aid with a view to supporting the sales of the same business’ own products – which may be hybrid seeds, fertilisers, agricultural equipment, or even surplus grain that was not consumed in the west! If these NGOs got the Africans producing their own food, it would actually take a big chunk out of their own funder’s market. A lot bureaucrats would lose cushy jobs in big glass buildings with chauffeur driven 4WDs and weekly 5-star conventions all around the world. In fact, for them, supporting Permaculture would be downright stupid!

The same drip irrigation system in close-up. The system has been devised using
locally available materials – hose pipe, iron reinforcing bar, plastic water
bottles (cut into sleeves to increase infiltration/prevent run off and hold the
hose above the ground so holes are not blocked by mud) and
acacia thorns (to regulate the drip holes).

So, where do you begin to tackle such monumental challenges? Well, we use Permaculture principles of course! Start small and scale up. And who are the smallest people? The kids! And where do you (or should you) find kids? In school.

And the most successful PC projects in Africa to date have been in schools. There are lots of good reasons for this. Children in rural Africa tend to be better educated than their parents, most of who probably didn’t go to school. Missionaries, NGOs and governments have all built huge numbers of schools in the past 50 years, all over the continent. So those kids are learning to communicate in international languages (mostly English), which allows them to access more information than their parents ever could. Being kids they also have an open mind. They are learning new things anyway!

A local PDC for school teachers from local villages, design exercises
use their own schools as examples.

One of the teachers presents her after map for her school design.

Participants on one of our international PDCs present their design. This pair are the administrators of a newly established indigenous pastoralists association who are based around the Awash river in the Great Rift Valley

That is why we began working on Permaculture with schools in southern Ethiopia. ‘We’ means myself, the founder and director of the first Permaculture demonstration site and training centre in the country, Strawberry Fields Eco Lodge, and Tichafa Makovere, one of the first indigenous Africans to become a PDC facilitator back in the mid ’90s in Zimbabwe. Tichafa and his colleagues lead development of the Permaculture in Schools movement across Southern Africa over the last 15 years. Today Permaculture is recognised at the national level and is fully integrated into the government’s educational policy in Malawi and Zimbabwe, and is moving in that direction in five other countries in the region, from Kenya to Zambia.

We have now begun movement in the horn of Africa, starting down south, in the drought-ridden swath of lowlands that stretches from Southern Ethiopia, through Northern Kenya and into Somalia. The whole area has again been on the brink of starvation for the past two years. We work in Konso, a quaint little land of rustic charm, peopled by a peaceful race of sedentary farmers who construct dry stone terraces across the rugged slopes of a basalt outcrop 300km north of the Kenya border, on the rim of the Great Rift Valley. Their main fare is sorghum, which they intercrop with various beans, sunflowers, cassava, coffee, Moringa stenopetala and various local hardwood trees. They are known as the best farmers in the area. However the crops have failed for all four seasons of the last two years, and, but for the UN grain convoys that have been rolling in, there may have been a famine on.

Grey water used to irrigate the same banana trees. Deep compost filled pits
allow and water supply allows effective establishment for banana plants
on the bare ridge-tops where the clay remains dry beneath 10cm even
through the rainy season.

The typical school compound in Konso is a half-hectare dirt yard with 10 or so classrooms, a few trees and some ceremonial flag-poles. Our aim is to turn that into an interactive learning and demonstration site for community empowerment and food security. We begin this with the teachers – they get a full PDC and produce designs for their own schools in the process. The community is brought in to implement and there will be a follow up program – competitions, open days, refresher courses, exchange visits and PC will be included on the school syllabus. The kids learn how they can make use of waste materials to build soil and establish trees, and waste water to yield food, even in drought time – after all, hands, bodies, plates and clothes are always being washed.

As for lack of technology, there is no such thing. Those technologies we use in the west, fancy drip irrigation equipment, excavating machinery, etc. are just not appropriate in Africa, because people don’t have the means to acquire them or maintain them. We look for locally produced appropriate design technologies, which can be built from local resources and are compatible with cultural and economic constraints. This includes things like wood-saving cook-stoves, solar cookers and drip irrigation systems using simple accessible materials – like cheap hosepipe hole-punched with acacia thorns. This can work very nicely if the holes are held off the ground by sections of chopped up plastic bottle which both stop soil from clogging them and prevent water from running over the soil and eroding the bed when it gets saturated. Another successful design technology are the composting toilets which we have developed at SFEL – a simple, affordable and effective solution to the problem of community sanitation, which requires no manufactured or imported materials, just wood to build it, ash and grass to operate it and the odd banana seedling to plant on top of the manure from time to time.

Our composting toilet design is simple, easy to replicate, easy to operate and
effective. A mobile housing sits above a 2m deep pit. Hay and ash are added as
it is used. Once 50cm from the surface the humanure is covered with top soil,
a new pit dug and the housing moved. A banana tree will be planted
on top of the covered humanure.

User’s instructions in English and Amharic.

As for lack of capital, we have to start small and get it right. All we need is a little capital to begin with. As communities see the results and begin to embrace the development the movement begins to gather its own momentum. New partners will be drawn in. It’s clear that there has to be some inflow of resources from the outside to get the movement going, but there are enough interested parties about to allow that. A UK based charity has even agreed to support the initiative; The Ethiopia Permaculture Foundation (EPF). Of sixty three schools in Konso we have run a pilot in three, working with Save the Children, Finland. A second NGO, Mercy Corps, now looks set to bring another two schools into the project. Meanwhile the EPF has agreed to add another ten schools over the next three years. The sixty two schools are organised into thirteen geographical clusters around the Konso Woreda. Our aim is to implement in one school in each cluster before we go on to add more schools. That will mean that in each area there is a local example of a PC school which can act as a demonstration site for its neighbouring schools.

A wood saving stove design which addresses some major social and
ecological problems in Konso – women’s labour burden and
respiratory health and deforestation.

A typical school-yard in Konso. This is in the village of Brokara, one of the
3 schools we have implemented in during the PKSP pilot phase.

Implementation in Fuchucha school (August 2009).

Community mobilisation brought both students and parents into the school
to implement the designs the teachers had produced during their PDC
(August 2009)

Brokara school in January 2010 – Zone 1 vegetable gardens already giving a
yield. Moringa and fruit trees beginning to come through. We have empowered
a community to provide for its needs and generate income.

One of our teacher course-graduates shows us around his schools’ design
implementation at Debena village in June 2010.