In 1999 the Ministry of Education officially began a “School Feeding” programme to decrease absenteeism and to reduce drop-out rates. Currently the programme only provides service to about 600 of the 5,200 primary schools. Almost every school is completely dependent upon outside resources to run the programme. In a 2003 survey of “School Feeding” programmes:

92 percent of the schools surveyed stated they are unable to continue school feeding if donors pulled out.

The name itself, School Feeding, reveals the dependency of the programme. Schools that have been a part of the programme then ‘dropped’ are keenly aware of this problem and will be happy to learn that there is a local solution when we all work together!

This article overviews the beginning stages of the development process from 2006 January and provides you with some of the steps along the way highlighting a few successes and challenges as of April 2008.

Before we begin, we’ll share 2 short stories from schools located in Thyolo:

School 1:  Nkaombe Primary School

The following sets of pictures are from October 2006, June 2007, and April 2008.  The first set are just the picture, the second set has captions describing them to help show the fixed points in each picture – it gets hard to believe that the pictures are taken in the same place with all the plants and trees!

(click on any photo to enlarge it)

This school caught onto the idea of Permaculture immediately.  In the initial school half-day sensitizations in July 2006, they went back to their school and start to apply the ideas.  By October 2006 when we held the first workshops, this school already brough experience to the table – amazing people are at that school!

They organized themselves by class and village so that each area of the school had a group in charge of its design and maintenance – these really helps to break up big bare peices of earth into smaller, more manageable pieces.  The head master and and the Teacher Permaculture Faciliator were strong forces of change and implemented everything at their homes.  Positive role models are extremely valuable in the process of change.

School 2:  Thunga TDC, Primary and Secondary

A Teacher Development Centre is a central point for 10-15 primary schools (the previous story of Nkaombe is of a school that is supported by Thunga TDC).  At the TDC there is a Primary Education Advisor who supports primary school teachers to improve their access to resources, knowledge and skills.  Teachers use the TDC for meetings, reporting and learning.  The end result of this aims at improved learning environments for the children and the parents / community members who are involved in the school.

This picture is of Thunga TDC in October 2006 (with the secondary school in the background, not directly involved in the pilot, but who has started copying the work at the TDC and has joined in on the planning and coordination committee’s work). It takes a lot of work to keep a TDC looking like this!  Daily sweeping of the grounds takes 20 people 30 minutes every day which is 10 hours of people labour every day.  For the school year there are 180 school days which is 1,800 hours a year of work (or 225 working days – that’s a lot of time and energy wasted!).

The TDC committee and community had a hard time starting up and catching on to the ideas in the programme.  Many still thought there were going to be ‘handouts’ provided such as tools, seeds, money, etc.  The few that got the idea tried to develop the land, but those that didn’t get it worked directly against the progress.

Something finally changed about a year after the programme started (October 2006 was the first workshop, they came around in about October 2007).  Once the TDC committee and community were all on the same page, they were able to work wonders in a short amount of time.

This picture shows the result of the committees work from October 2007 to February 2008 (5 months).  How did they manage this?  First, working together towards the same vision.  Next, taking a close look at all the resources they had available to them.  Then, creating a design based on their resources, their vision and the realities of the climate and geography where they are located.  Finally, implementing the design, adapting it as needed along the way and Viola! improved environment, food and money.

The TDC has a market just 100 meters from where they are and they took advantage of all the organic matter, including seeds, that get swept into piles there.  Instead of leaving the resource wasted, they collected the piles of organic matter and made it into rich planting beds.  When the rainy season came in December, their land was ready to grow – and grow it did!

They now are able to harvest vegetables daily, some for eating and some for sale back to the market.  Data on the estimated amounts harvested are coming in from the schools in April and May, so in the future we hope to share more concrete estimates with you.  But, we know this – the land is producing where it wasn’t producing before, all because of a shift in mindset and using the resources that were previously wasted.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story so that you can learn how we developed this idea at a national level.

Developing the Sustainable School (Permaculture) programme:

In January 2006 the Ministry of Education, Science and Technolgy (MoEST) began to develop a school food programme that would benefit all schools and be able to be completely run by the MoEST and communities. A National Working Group of 19 people from all levels (headquarters, divisions, districts, schools and communities) worked together to explore current programmes around the world and learn from lessons already taking place in Malawi.

The overall goal is for teachers to physically implement the curriculum at the School with the learners.

A curriculum should be visible at the school, not something that remains as words on paper.  Schools role model the curriculum while teaching it to the learners, providing a productive environment for learning.  At the same time there are multiple benefits to the learners, teachers and parents through food production, improved natural environment and a calming environment for learning.

Sustainability Principles

1. Sustain -  to continue, to keep going, forever adapting
2. Able -  to be possible

In order for the programme to be sustainable, the National Working Group felt the following principles are important and should be followed in Malawi:

• Participatory process
• Commitment from all key partners at all levels
• Clear understanding all the concepts and technologies
• Using & sharing locally available resources
• Flexible and adaptable
• Messages are integrated and consistent with other sectors’ key messages.

To encourage sustainability, the emphasis is on low-input strategies that every school or community in Malawi can replicate using their own resources and without the need for additional outside funding. The responsibility for the long-term support for the project lies directly with MoE through integration of the ideas into the teacher and agricultural training systems.

School is at the Leader right from the Beginning

The development phases are supported by GTZ for training, technical advisors, and Permaculture consultants. It is expected that schools will need 1 and a half years of technical guidance to take them through a full cycle of seasons. The 1.5 years starts with the:

• School as the leader and
• Technical advisors stepping away slowly from the beginning

This is in contrast to what most development programmes do when they put the technical advisor as the leader at the start and then wait until the last month to ‘hand over’.  In our case, the “Exit Strategy and Hand Over” start at the beginning.It took about 6 months to develop the programme which was termed the “Sustainable Food and Nutrition Programme” and based on Permaculture Design principles.  The 2 main activities in the programme are:

1. Increasing knowledge and skills in order to sustainably design and implement gardens, orchards and food programmes at the schools. Each school selects a community member, agricultural extension worker and teacher to be trained as Permaculture Facilitators, then their role is to assure that the programme is integrated into the whole school. In Permaculture fashion, knowledge sharing and continual learning by all is encouraged.
2. Integrating lessons of sustainable nutrition, hygiene, sanitation, health, gender, HIV, economics, agriculture and the environment in a new, improved way of thinking and acting sustainably in all we do. Permaculture is integrated into lessons, practical activities and manual work. (Changes to the national curriculum are being worked on with the Malawi Institute of Education to assure that schools receive consistent, clear messages from all directions.)

The concept was approved by the MoEST for piloting and taken to District Executive Committees for feedback and interest in taking part in the pilot.  The idea was enthusiastically received. Older people commented that this idea is not a new one, school gardens are something that used to happen in schools as part of agriculture lessons when they were children but faded away over the years. The difference between the past and the current programme is that it is integrated throughout the school system (school, community and agriculture extension) and across almost every subject and is built for sustainability and local control of the programme.The timeline for the process we took in Malawi is highlighted here, contact Stacia for more details:

Year 1
06 January - Started developing with National Working Group
July - Principle Secretary of Education approved
September - Facilitators selected
October - 28 facilitators trained. ~ 3 per Zone cluster
November - Permaculture consultants work with individual schools 2 times a month

Year 2
07 January - National meetings suggest each school have 2 people fully trained
February - More facilitators selected
March - 145 facilitators trained / retrained ~ 3 per School
June - Permaculture consultants work with individual school 1 time a month
October - Permaculture consultants extended for another 6 months
08 April - Consultants finish 1.5 year contracts, government monitor schoolsThis is a very exciting and ambitious programme that the Government is undertaking, and it is currently being piloted until August 2008 in 8 of the 27 districts in 40 primary schools, 10 Teacher Development Centres, and 1 Teacher Training College (a total of 8 TTCs are in country).

Selecting Pilot Schools

Each school was selected through a sensitization process which stressed that there would be no handouts or inputs or incentives, that the incentive was improved food and nutrition security and an improved environment.
It was also stressed that the school itself would need to organize itself to get all the planning, implementation and monitoring done. No one would do it for them. Only technical knowledge and skills would be given.
Schools that were not interested in this goal, or who had other critical problems at their schools were encouraged not to apply! It sounds a bit harsh, but with the level of dependency throughout Malawi, it was important to identify those who are truly interested, not those who were looking for allowances.

List of Permaculture Pilot Schools

The following is a list of the pilot schools, if you are in Malawi, I encourage you to visit them, letting the District staff know that you would like to visit.  There should be at District School Health and Nutrition Coordinator in the MoEST District level staff (The plan is to (re)-train them in 2008).

Karonga 1. Lupaso 2. Malungo 3. Chinsebe 4. Masoko 5. Kasoba	Nkhata Bay 6. Ching’oma 7. Sanga 8. Chipuzumumba 9. Chilala 10. Maula	Lilongwe 11. Nankhonde 12. Chimwa 13. Malikha 14. Mataka 15. Chimwasongwe	Dedza 16. Maonde 17. Lobi 18. Chiphe 19. Chimwankhuku 20. Mphunzi
Zomba 21. Songani 22. Mpungulira 23. Naminga’zi 24. Nsondole 25. Katamba	Thyolo 26. Thunga 27. Namaona 28. Chinthebe 29. Wilson 30. Nkaombe	Mulanje 31. Ulongwe Model 32. Chisitu FP 33. Mulanje CCAP 34. Nalipiri JP 35. Ngolowera JP	Nsanje 36. Nyamadzere 37. Chikunkha 38. Nsanje Catholic 39. Mthawira 40. Mataka

Results up to April 2008

Some schools are changing incredibly fast – others are moving more slowly, but the marjority are right on track.

watch this space for more data / photos / presentations in the future –

Successes

• All schools have harvested something – some several times.  Some schools eat the food, others share it, and others sell it and put the funds into the School Management Committee Fund.

• One school harvested enough food in the first few months to provide each of the 1,700 pupils a snack of ‘futali’ – a starchy root cooked with peanut flour.

• Another school had enough pumpkins so that the whole school had a pumpkin feast.

• Almost all schools are reducing their labour and increasing productivity by changing the destructive habit of over-sweeping the dirt and burning organic matter to a better habit mulching and caring for plants, trees and animals.

• In the first 1.5 years, schools planted between 1,000 and 5,000 trees and other perennials and thousand more annual plants per school.

• All schools are at different levels of organization in terms of planning and coordination committees and work schedules to get the designing, planning and implementation structured in an independent and sustainable manner.

• Schools, homes, hospitals and other institutions surrounding the pilot schools are copying what the schools are doing – Learners at the school are proving to be an amazing way to spread positive messages back into their communities.

A few of the challenges

• Disagreements at the school, not related to the programme.  If a school is not unified (or mostly unified) it is almost impossible to do any type of development at the school.

• People not managing their livestock – which is destructive to plants and trees, does not manage the manure efficiently and can be unhygienic with manure scattered everywhere.

• Lack of confidence from a long history of dependency. Some of the schools still thought that there were going to be ‘inputs’ or ‘food aid’ provided despite the lengthy and repeated sensitizations. This mentality slowed down the success at their schools.

The successes in the pilot are well outweighing the challenges. Each of the challenges are being addressed by the schools themselves and with Unity, they are proving that anything is possible!

Downloads

School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Permaculture Programme Pilot, 2008 April

Feel free to use any of the presentations or slides, quoting the source.

The slides were developed by Stacia & Kristof Nordin with contributions from Chris Walker, a Permaculture trainer in Malawi.  It is converted to pdf and broken into parts

SHN Permaculture Pilot 2008-04, Part 1 : Pages 1-10 (505 kb)

SHN Permaculture Pilot 2008-04, Part 2 : Pages 11-20 (908 kb)

SHN Permaculture Pilot 2008-04, Part 3 : Pages 21-30 (920 kb)

SHN Permaculture Pilot 2008-04, Part 4 : Pages 31-40 (1.2 mb)

SHN Permaculture Pilot 2008-04, Part 5 : Pages 41-51 (1.7 mb)

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Stacia Nordin, RD (Registered Dietitian), nordin@eomw.net , MoE School Health and Nutrition Technical Advisor, courtesy of GTZ (German Technical Cooperation), a development company owned by the German Government. See www.gtz.de for more information on GTZ.