Siunga Primary school - Kenya - 2014

in 2014 I had the opportunity to visit the Practical Permaculture Institute of Kenya. It was the first institute created in the Seven Ravens project to build 5 such institutes throughout East Africa.

It was amazing to see the difference that this project had made after only one year. It really highlighted for me the importance of this type of work and how fast we can heal the land using appropriate practices.

 Not far from this Institute, I spent a week with the Seven Ravens students designing and implementing a project at Siunga Primary School in the Western Province of Kenya. We installed a nursery, a food forest, and many food production gardens. As always in permaculture, water harvesting techniques were used to shape the land and increase food production passively.

It took us only 5 days of work with the students to change a heavily compacted piece of land into the beginning of an impressive food production system. Given that school meals are often the only food students eat in a day, it is easy to understand why installing food production systems at schools has been shown to increase academic and sports' performance.

Being involved in these projects showed me how knowledge is the key to success and deepened my commitment to developing my own knowledge base so that I can contribute more effectively to future projects.

 Here is the breakdown of a productive circle we added to the main crop field to redirect problematic water overflow that was damaging the building's foundation and put it to good use.