CSDi’s Winter Quarter of Online Development Courses Begin January 11, 2012

The Challenges: Worldwide over 1 billion people suffer from hunger. 2.6 billion people don’t have access to decent sanitation facilities. 1.1 billion people in developing countries don’t have access to safe drinking water. Hope dims for universal education by 2015: 72 million children of primary school age the majority of them girls, do not attend school. 1.3 billion people in developing countries live on $1.25 a day or less.

Become the Solution. Are you a donor, a development practitioner, in a job transition, or a student who wants to learn more about what works in designing, sustainable, impact-oriented development projects?

CSDi Online Courses Capture a True Field Experience
Our online courses use each class assignment as a concrete step in developing a real project within a real community. You will take an assignment into the field and use it as a solution-oriented activity that you do together with community members—thereby finishing one component of the project you are developing in the class. And there you have it: an online field course with tangible, concrete results.

Don’t have community access? No problem: we partner you with a fellow student in a developing nation who does. Click on the course links below to see syllibi, course fees, and to enroll.

What Works in Development?
CSDi is firmly committed to proven, results-based solutions to end suffering & poverty. Our goal is to spread these solutions across the globe through our in-depth field guides & interactive online workshops.

Work with us & become the solution. We’ve trained course participants from 113 countries and 320 roganizations to develop real, on-the-ground projects, using over 150 different kinds of activities,  with real communities, impacting over 170,000 people.

CSDi Winter Quarter 2012: Online Development Courses Begin January 11

	341. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 1: Designing & Funding CBA Projects. January 11 – March 5, 2012. Contemporary methods of developing sustainable, impact-oriented projects. Gain practical field experience using evidence-based activities & develop a real project in real time. Student CBA projects have included efforts to help communities in Yemen, Morocco, Tanzania and Cameroon recover from unprecedented droughts that exhausted their water sources.
	342. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 2: Planning for Impact. January 11 – February 20, 2012. Imbed impact into your adaptation project with a powerful set of management tools. LogFrames, detailed budgets, timelines, compelling fact sheets, M&E plans, outcomes and impact. These tools will communicate to donors and stakeholders exactly what you are trying to accomplish—and can be used for effective management of the project once funded.
	343. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 3: The Community Focus. January 11 – March 5, 2012. What does climate change adaptation mean at the community level? What practical tools are available today for communities to use in adaptation? Use local knowledge to learn about vulnerability, adaptive capacity & traditional strategies. For practitioners who wish to begin working now at the community level to successfully adapt to the challenges that face us.
	344. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 4: Sustainable Implementation. January 11 – February 20, 2012. How do you launch & implement a community-based adaptation project? The importance of community engagement. Developing skill sets for your community to use in the adaptation process. Learning tools: monitoring & evaluation. Community empowerment during project hand-over. Designing in sustainability, follow-up, mentoring & participatory M&E.

	303. Food Security, Nutrition and Home Gardens 1: January 11 – March 5, 2012. Implement a 12-month family gardening project. Develop a baseline of your community’s food security and nutritional levels. Learn about food security, good nutrition, and the garden activities that support them—and then learn how to build a project that puts your community on the path to using their own skills to address their specific needs. Become the Solution.
	304. Food Security, Nutrition and Home Gardens 2: January 11 – February 20, 2012. How do you care for & maintain a food garden? How do you control pests? What happens if you have desert soil—or a shortage of water? Learn how to combine garden produce with daily staples to prepare nutritious meals that contain vitamins A, C and D. Increase family understanding of kitchen hygiene, cooking, and nutrition—including using delicious nutrition-packed recipes.

	101. From the Ground Up: Designing & Funding Sustainable Projects. January 11 – March 5, 2012. Develop a Real Project in Real Time. We’ll walk you, step-by-step, through a community-based project using proven methods. Learn a range of skills including participatory needs assessments, community capacity building workshops, and evidence-based project design. You will learn strategies from others in the class facing similar challenges. Become the Solution.
	102. Project Architecture: Planning for Impact. January 11 – February 20, 2012. Imbed impact into your 101 project design with powerful management tools. LogFrames, detailed budgets, schedules, compelling fact sheets, M&E plans, outcomes & impact. These tools will communicate to donors & stakeholders exactly what your project will accomplish, and lead the effective management of the project once funded.

The Courses also Provide the Following Resources:

Weekly discussions, and assignment examples & templates
Documents on course topics by contemporary experts.
Books, posters and manuals available online for download.
Internet development links organized by sector.
Class forum for posting questions to your classmates.
Access to tools and resources on the Center site.
There are no books to buy—all course materials can be linked to, or downloaded from the course site.

Questions? Just write us at Online.Learning@csd-i.org .

Be sure to visit our Online Development Community . Join 600 colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

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Would you like to learn more about what the course environment is like? Just visit these pages:

Student Testimonials

International Partnerships

Learning Environment

Student Field Projects

Example Assignment: Kenya

Student Countries, Organizations, Project Challenges

Home Gardens for Food Security. First step: Soil Restoration with Compost

Frequently people in developing countries are living in areas with depleted soil. So the first thing we recommend community members to do is to begin a restoration project for the soil by adding organic material, thus begin rebuilding a soil structure which guides and holds water, supports microorganisms, and retains soil nutrients.   Studies have shown that home gardens can provide 60% of leafy vegetables & 50% of all fruits and vegetables consumed by households & have shown evidence of significantly reducing the number of malnourished children. Follow link to see downloadable gardening resources.

Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation: A Guide for Practitioners

Climate change adaptation is an area of growing concern for many developing countries. Increasingly, countries are coming to realize that, in the long term, climate change adaptation needs to be supported by an integrated, cross-cutting approach. We are pleased to draw your attention to a new Guide released by UNDP-UNEP. This guide provides practical, step-by-step guidance on how governments and other national actors can mainstream climate change adaptation into national development planning as part of broader mainstreaming efforts. .

Climate Change Risk & Vulnerability in a Remote Tanzanian Village
	Chris Enns & Catalina Gheorghe are doing a community-based adaptation to climate change project in Wagete village, Tanzania, impacting 4,000 villagers. Their project is a ‘mainstreamed’ project—they are incorporating adaptation to climate change activities into a traditional rural development project. They have a healthcare & education component— and for adaptation—a soil & water conservation program & a farmer extension program. Detailed project outline & great photos at link. They’ve been determining their risks and vulnerabilities to climate change by combining scientific data with local community knowledge. Chris & community developed a list of local resources, hazard maps, seasonal calendar & historical timeline.
To learn about other student projects in real time, please visit our Facebook Page or CSDi Development Community to see their postings—or our Field Projects page for in-depth project information.

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is the people’s right to decide what they eat & what they produce. The concept of food sovereignty contests the globalization of agribusiness & proposes defending family farming through producing healthy food for local markets while creating jobs and protecting the land and its diversity.   More student projects relate to growing food than any other single development challenge. Farmers are faced with record drought, storms, have depleted soils, a shortage of irrigation water & a lack of funds for purchasing seed. Solutions for these challenges can be very simple: soil conservation techniques like mulching, and water conservation techniques like watering plant roots with inexpensive micro-drip irrigation.

Join us on September 6 for an intensive series of courses with other students from all over the world.

Are you a donor, a development practitioner, in a job transition, or a student who wants to learn more about what works in designing impact-oriented projects? Online course participants are using our courses to develop real, on-the-ground projects with real communities—both individually and through North/South student partnerships.   Our online courses use each class assignment as a concrete step in developing a real project within a real community. You will take an assignment into the field and use it as a solution-oriented activity that you do together with community members—thereby finishing one component of the project you are developing in the class. And there you have it: an online field course with tangible, concrete results.   Visit Online Learning to see a listing of Fall Quarter courses.

Home Gardening for Food Security
During the past few years while I’ve been working in Guatemala I haven’t had access a garden. Just a month ago I changed houses and have a little plot of ground now.

I began collecting seed packets a few months ago in anticipation of the move. Two weeks ago, I planted most of the seeds in inexpensive plastic seed flats. These will be transplanted from the flats into the the garden beds in a few weeks. I’ve planted flowers such as Marigold which have shown success in repelling insects. I’ve planted a whole range of salad material: different kinds of lettuces, arugula, spinach, tomatoes and onions. And I’ve planted a whole range of hot, spicy peppers.

Please look at the home gardening and composting resources at the bottom of this page.

	But mostly I’ve planted things that I can’t get in Guatemala that I miss from having lived in the States. Two weeks after planting the seeds I now have hundreds of healthy seedlings germinating.
	Behind the house, I’ve cleared two garden areas where I can begin to do direct seeding for things like peas and beans and potatoes and carrots—while I wait for my seedlings in the seed flats to mature.
	I love having a vegetable garden, but the reason that I’m developing one now, is that in looking at student projects from around the world, chronic malnutrition is one of the biggest challenges that the developing world faces—and I want to begin practicing what I preach.
	I was deeply affected recently by an article about famine conditions in a region of Guatemala called the Polochic. A journalist asked a group of mothers of severely malnourished children why they didn’t grow gardens to increase their available food.
	The answer was simple: they didn’t know how to start a vegetable garden and they didn’t want to embarrass themselves by failing. This had a big impact on me and was one of the main reasons that I began teaching home gardens for nutrition courses.

On average 49.3% of children under five in Guatemala suffer from chronic malnutrition: the highest rate in all of Latin America and one of the highest in the world according to UNICEF. But in areas of the rural countryside the situation is more serious where more than 74% of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition and 33% suffer from severe malnutrition. This can lead to delayed growth, learning disabilities—making it difficult for children to attend and concentrate in school—negatively impacting their ability to mature into productive adults.

Consequently, in teaching courses on food security, nutrition, and home gardens I want to make sure that I am a fellow participant in having a home garden. Guatemala will have many of the same gardening challenges that other developing nations have. We have a six-month dry season—and a six-month rainy season. Right now it’s been raining steadily for two weeks and my newly prepared garden areas have been flooding. Several of my seed flats have fungus growing on the surface of the soil. When I’ve tried growing vegetables before in Guatemala many of my crops were destroyed by white fly.

But today before I plant any of my direct seeds, or my starts, I need to get some organic matter into my soil. In our home gardening course this is the first thing that we encourage people to do. Frequently, people are living in areas with depleted soil. The soil has been overused, it has suffered from wind and water erosion, or it has been abused by the overuse of fertilizer and monoculture plantings.

Much like in Guatemala, our home gardening students also suffer from intermittent drought—punctuated by heavy rains and storms.

So the first thing we encourage them to do is to begin a restoration project for the soil. Degraded soil erodes more rapidly because of its fine, silt like quality. When it does rain, the rain doesn’t easily penetrate into the soil, and frequently just runs off the surface of the soil—taking soil particles with it. This impacts me the soil’s ability to retain soil moisture.

By adding organic material, you begin rebuilding a soil structure which has passageways for guiding and holding water, for supporting microorganisms, and for retaining soil nutrients.

In the first year of planting a garden, many families don’t have available compost. Adding any organic material will be a benefit. Leaves, chopped up twigs or cornstalks, cow manure, and kitchen waste added to the soil of the time of planting will begin to develop structure on day one—and will decompose over several months to become compost. Dry grass can be laid on top of planting beds as a mulch to reduce the impact of heavy rains during the rainy season, and to reduce evaporative losses during the dry season.

But as soon as you have your first planting completed, you should begin building a compost pile. This does not need to be a complex project. Laying a 6” layer of cornstalks or twigs or other dry vegetable matter in a layer on the ground will allow for air circulation. Following up with layers of green organic materials followed by manure followed by a thin layer of soil followed by kitchen waste will begin setting the scene for aerobic decomposition of these materials. Within a few months, you will have finished compost for your next garden bed. Please check out some of the links below for detailed information on how to do this.

Just like many of the community members that I work with, I don’t have a ready-made compost pile. In fact, over the past month, I’ve gone around to nurseries and friends to find out where I could buy some compost. They sort of cock their head and looked at me funny. Compost? I guess it just isn’t part of the local culture yet.

Fortunately, my co-worker Michelle Berkowitz, was at an agricultural meeting a couple of weeks ago, and met a woman named Marielos Merida who makes compost using earthworms. They mix cornstalks with manure, introduce earthworms, and several months later she has rich and wonderful compost. Marielos Merida is an agronomist with the Institute for Agricultural Science and Technology (ICTA) here in Guatemala. Her specialty is organic agriculture.

Her organization sells this compost for five dollars per 100 pound bag. So I have placed my order—and Marielos will be delivering the compost on Wednesday—so that I can plant this weekend.

I already started building a compost pile a month ago when I moved in. Grass clippings, hedge clippings, and kitchen waste are all going into the new compost pile. I will use some of the worm compost to start a worm bin, and some of the worm compost to seed my new compost pile as well. Hopefully within 3 to 6 months I will have fresh compost for my next garden bed.

Please check into this blog in two weeks when I will have photographs of forming raised beds in planting the initial seeds.

Online Links:
South Africa: Life is a Garden: Make your own Compost

South Africa: Live Eco: How to make your own compost heap

Downloadable Resources from the Center for Sustainable Development
How-To Card on Making Raised Vegetable Garden Beds and Planting Seeds

Lesson Plan for Leading a Community Workshop Making Raised Vegetable Garden Beds and Planting Seeds

Online Course on Food Security, Nutrition, and Home Gardens 1

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Learn how to develop a community centered, impact oriented project.