By Julia Smith | COO
Pro-microfinance wishes you a very happy holiday season and is delighted to share some photos of the successful roll-out of the Community Shamba Project, a subproject that partners with its Butembo office for financial services and local coordination support.
On Monday, October 13, 2014 the first full Permaculture design training of trainers to be offered in Butembo, DRC began. The two-week, intensive training was co-sponsored by Pro-Microfinance International and the Permaculture Research Institute- Kenya. Instructors Joseph Lentunyoi and Aaron Karumba traveled from Kenya and Southern Congo respectively to work with the course’s 29 participants, who were a mix of school teachers and farmers from agricultural cooperatives. The two week course exposed participants to a number of new skills and techniques, as well as practical exercises in a demonstration garden, such as the sheet-mulch sandwich pictured. Course participants also learned advanced composting, contouring and recycling techniques for biological wastes. Participants were excited to be exposed especially to the practical aspects of the curriculum, which brought classroom theories to life.
Participants commented that they appreciated the course and the skills gained from it. In a country where 70% of the population lacks access to adequate food and 1 in 4 children are malnourished (WFP, 2012), a training-of-trainers model for grassroots organizations such as those represented in the course is an important step forward in addressing-and spreading awareness on- local, environmental opportunities and knowledge gaps.
Course participants expressed an eagerness to receive further trainings in many of the topics introduced during the course, such as bio-gases, mushroom cultivation, bee-keeping and pesticide. All participants were unanimously happy to have had the opportunity to participate.
Pro-microfinance is delighted to have played a role in the facilitation of this training and hopes to be able to coordinate more similar courses in the future. Please consider a donation to PMI in place of a gift to a loved one this holiday season- your donations are absolutely invaluable to us.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
