Support Rural Leaders in Training Connections

Challenge

Rural areas across the globe are suffering a decline as climate change and urbanization continue. The solution lies in strengthening rural communities, so they are self-sufficient, sustainable, and resilient. Community resiliency is a critical element that allows communities to adapt and build capacity when challenging environments present obstacles to stability or growth. A key component of resiliency is rural leadership, taught to rural leaders at the Asian Rural Institute for enduring impact.

Solution

Community leaders from the poorest regions of the world travel to Japan to study at ARI for 9 months, learning low-input regenerative agriculture and servant leadership techniques. By uprooting themselves and living in an intentionally-diverse community, ARI participants experience different skills they can choose as the most appropriate for their community. When they leave ARI, they return home with both new knowledge to uplift their neighbors, and the leadership to best convey those skills.

Long-Term Impact

Each individual educated at ARI returns home to induce measured, sustainable impacts. Examples from ARI graduates include teaching hundreds of families sufficiency through kitchen gardens and soap-making workshops; doubling their home village's chicken production through teaching schoolchildren poultry raising; organizing victims of civil war in farming; each graduate of ARI has a different story of success based on their home region's context and issues -- ARI provides the knowledge to succeed.

Resources

• Asian Rural Institute main page
• AFARI main page -- US Supporters Group