PRI Konso, South Ethiopia to Run Two PDC-Internship Combos This Coming September-October and December-January

Alex McCausland July 29, 2013

1 2 minutes read

Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge is pleased to announce we are running our 29th and 30th PDCs in September and December 2013 and a 4-week Internship to follow each, at our educational, demonstration site in South Ethiopia. We are based in Konso, a semi-arid ethnic homeland in the southern Great Rift Valley. The unique Konso people are known for their terraced agriculture and have received UNESCO World Heritage Site status for their “Cultural Landscape” made up of their sophisticated mixed dryland agriculture and their fortified hill-top villages. Despite their heroic efforts to glean a living from the barren hills and their careful stewardship of the land, the Konso People still face a range of challenges such as deforestation, gradual environmental degradation, the labour burden on women and lingering food insecurity.

Strawberry Fields Eco-Lodge is the first active permaculture demonstration site in the country, demonstrating a range of low-tech and low-cost solutions to the challenges of working in the tough environment. We have also developed a local community outreach project, training teachers and mobilising school communities to implement permaculture in their school compounds, providing income and food for the schools. We train more school teachers from participating schools alongside the international groups on each PDC we run, so, in line with the PRI Master Plan ethos, those who do PDCs with us are not only learning permaculture (and having the experience of a lifetime) but also supporting its spread in the local community of the area.

Our PDC syllabus is PRI accredited and as such covers all the topics in the Designers’ Manual and equips the participant to design in all climate zones. The teaching has a solid scientific basis as well as being practically illustrated by a range of activities and design exercises throughout the course. However, given the setting, the focus will of course lean towards working in low tech situations and towards developmental issues. A field trip will be conducted to visit and assess the success of some of the school projects during the PDC.

We also still have places available on the course we are running in September and the 4 week internship to follow in Sep/Oct 2013. There is still a few days left to get the early bird discount on that one… so, hope to see you in Konso.

Find out more and book!