Project of the Month. I’m very lucky because every week I receive project progress reports from people from all over the world. I get to learn the intricate details about people’s lives living in drought conditions in deserts, I get to learn about people living in flood conditions in river deltas, and I get to learn about people’s lives in conflict situations.

To download these reports and learn about the participatory process please go to the bottom of the page.

	This week I received a project report from Chris Enns (Canadian, but living and working in Tanzania), and Catalina Gheorghe (Colombian, but living and working in Romania); additional support was submitted by Philip Chiwanga of AICT-MUD a partnering organization with Chris’s organization CRWRC.
	They are doing a community-based adaptation to climate change project with five hamlets in a village called Wagete, Tanzania, impacting 4,000 community members. Their project is what is known as a community-based adaptation ‘mainstreamed’ project. This means that they are incorporating adaptation to climate change activities into a traditional rural development project.
	So for example, they have a healthcare component, an education component—and then for their adaptation components, a farmer soil and water conservation program and a farmer extension program. You can see a detailed outline of these programs on the downloadable reports below.
	Over the past few weeks they’ve been working on determining the risks and vulnerabilities to changing climatic conditions that these communities have and will face in the future. They’re using an approach which combines scientific data with local community knowledge.
	In simplified terms they can take meteorological data and projections to determine how much has the climate changed over the past few decades and how much is it expected to change—and compare that with local knowledge of how the weather has changed.

Collecting local knowledge is very participatory and very interesting. Working with a series of vulnerability and capacity analysis tools, Chris and his partner Philip worked with the community to develop a list of local resources, hazard maps, a seasonal calendar, a historical timeline and a discussion on current local coping strategies and aspired strategies. Here are a few examples of the workshop results:

Resources:

• Water wells
• Forest (bush)
• Seasonal river
• Primary school
• Land for crop cultivation
• Land for grazing

Hazards in their Community:

• Floods
• Drought
• Malaria spread
• Hunger (as a result of droughts)
• Lack of health services within the community
• Tuberculosis

Seasonal Calendar:

• Sowing seeds
• Farm preparation
• Building houses
• Selling crops
• Weeding
• Crop harvesting
• Grazing livestock

Drought and Flood
The facilitator asked group members to rank the vulnerability of each identified resource from each of the identified hazard.rought and flood ranked as the highest hazards to livelihood resources. See the livelihood/hazard results matrix here.

The information that was gathered during this process, and the way that the information was collected in the participatory fashion, will do two things at once. This Tanzania and team will be able to improve their project design with new and more complete information—and most importantly with community feedback—and the community will continue the process of developing ownership in their project. Being able to provide knowledge, feedback, and project direction continues to reinforce for the community that this is their project—not an outsider’s.

To see the project reports about the workshop and about assimilating the information (not to mention some of the best photos I’ve seen yet!) simply follow these links:
Enns Gheorghe A5
Philip Chiwanga VCA Workshop

To learn more about the process:

OL 343 Adapting to Climate Change: The Community Focus

CARE: Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis

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

In tallying up different kinds of projects, by and large, more student projects are related to growing food than any other single community challenge.

There are projects that are designed to address unsustainable farming practices, developing farmer field schools, food insecurity, and  home gardens for food security. There are projects on connecting subsistence farmers to markets so that they can increase family income, and projects on adapting agricultural practices in the face of climate variability.

Since water is so important to agriculture, and forests are a major part of the water cycle, there are reforestation, agroforestry, community-based forest management, forest stewardship and non-timber forest projects.

You can scan the list of student project activities and see the large number of agriculturally based project activities at the bottom of this page: http://www.csd-i.org/student-countries-ngos/ .

In a nutshell, people are hungry. 1 billion people are hungry in the world compared to 800 million in 2008. They’re faced with record drought and tremendous storms and floods. Farmers have depleted soils, a shortage of irrigation water, a lack of funds for purchasing seed and organic fertilizer. They suffer from a lack of knowledge of improved agricultural practices—and don’t realize that a family garden can help reduce hunger that builds in the months prior to the harvesting of

Solutions

The solutions for these challenges can be very simple: soil conservation techniques like mulching, water conservation techniques like watering plant roots with buried water bottles—or with inexpensive micro-drip irrigation. Raised beds, simple fences, the provision of a diversity of vegetable seed, and simple training programs can build a community of family gardens which will not only generate food but generate income.

An article in the June 10 Guardian Weekly “The global food crisis: The right to decide what we eat”  Ibrahim Coulibaly of Via Campesina brings up the issue of Food Sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the people’s right to decide what they eat and what they produce. The concept of food sovereignty arose in contest to the globalization of agribusiness and the challenges that food aid brings to developing communities.

Coulibaly argues that peasants and small farmers are the world’s main food producers yet they see that international food policies serve large conglomerates rather than the people. These policies transform small-scale agriculture into industrial plantations—and increase the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers concentrating food production into the hands of multinationals—contributing to environmental degradation and to the loss of forests and biodiversity.

In the mid-90s a group of small farmer organizations came together to defend sustainable family farming and defined Food Sovereignty as: producing healthy food for local markets while creating jobs and protecting the land and its diversity. This was the original definition of Food Sovereignty. We at the Center support Food Sovereignty by providing training for field staff and subsistence farmers on how to do this.

Only a few years ago, these concepts would have challenged donor mission and government policy. But today, we don’t need to feel nervous about approaching a large donor with grassroots ideas such as Food Sovereignty. They have begun to see the value in local development and are becoming increasingly supportive of these efforts.

To see just two simple examples of the kind of training we offer in Food Sovereignty have a quick look at these courses:
Food Security, Nutrition and Home Gardens.
Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change: 

To learn about student projects in real time, please visit our Facebook Page or CSDi Development Community to see their postings.

Last week we visited a family garden in Manchester—this week we will visit a family garden in Coventry—in the Midlands of England.

Chris Francis’ allotment at the Beachwood/Earlsdon Allotments are near the center of Coventry. Chris was kind enough to give me a tour of her allotment that she has had for 3 years. Chris and a friend share a ½ allotment (10m x 15m)  for which they pay $24/year—or $2 per month

	In the 1800’s this area just south of the center of Coventry was known as “Freeman’s Garden”—hinting at the fact that these have been allotments for perhaps two centuries. At the turn of the last century neighborhoods of Edwardian houses sprung up around and encircle the allotment.
	Beachwood/Earlsdon Allotments is much larger than the allotment I visited in Manchester and covers an area of 3 or 4 city blocks. They have 180 full (10m x 30m) allotments—many of which have been split in half since that seems to be a size which is more manageable.
	The first thing that I noticed was the look of permanence: Allotments all had sheds and many had greenhouses. There is even a central shed run by the association where one can warm up a lunch—or share a cup of tea with friends.
	Much like the allotments in Manchester, there is a central shed run by the association where they have an office and where they sell garden supplies like compost and manure.
	Chris and her partner have more fruit and a greater number of herbs than the allotment I visited in Manchester last week. Visit a Victory Garden in Manchester England https://ngo.csd-i.org/visit-a-victory-garden-in-manchester-england/ In her greenhouse she raises: Tomatoes

Crop List:

Cauliflower
Purple sprouting broccoli
Swiss Chard
Carrots
Leeks
Zucchini (courgettes)—3 types
Potatoes (5 types including Earlies: Maris Piper and Lady Balfour)
Runner Beans
Peas
Gooseberries
Onions
Spinach
Sweet Corn
Garlic
Apple Trees
Pear Trees
Rhubarb
Herb Garden

Challenges:
Two of their biggest challenges are white cabbage white butterfly (she covers the brasssica beds with netting), carrot root fly (she surrounds the carrot bed with a 24” highs wall of fine mesh; this is effective as the carrot root fly flies close to the ground), and slugs.

Soil & Water
Chris double digs her raised beds and liberally applies compost which she makes onsite, and also uses chicken manure and bone meal. She does not use insecticides nor chemical fertilizers.

In an effort to conserve water, the allotment association doesn’t allow watering with hoses; gardeners are required to use watering cans.

All and all, Chris’ garden is bountiful and I was able to enjoy several wonder meals made from her garden harvest which included potatoes, zucchini peas, salad and a classic English dessert–gooseberry crumble.

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