The Gumbi Alton Permaculture Project (GAPP) is ACAN’s climate justice project, in partnership with the Gumbi Education Fund founded by John Vidal over 20 years ago.

Malawi is a very poor African country (80% subsistence farming) highly vulnerable to climate change because most people farm the rain-fed staple crop, maize, and are dependent on very expensive chemical fertilisers and increasingly unpredictable rain. The Government declared a drought again in 2024 and requested UN food aid. Many Gumbi villagers live in grinding poverty.

Through ACAN, donors have funded the training in 2020-21 of 15 young people (women and men) in sustainable farming (permaculture) techniques at the Permaculture Paradise Institute https://permacultureinstitutemw.com/ and financially support organic permaculture (on a demonstration farm and on villagers’ own plots, their homesteads), giving money for 3 acres of land for the farm, tools, seeds and seedlings, bikes to get to the farm, various farm buildings and accommodation, solar panels and water storage and a solar pump.

An inspirational fundraising Zoom was held in November 2024, with Patrick Kamzitu. An edited recording is below. Click on the link for a slide presentation full of images of the farmers’ progress since 2020:

The GEF local co-ordinator in the Gumbi village, Patrick Kamzitu (a community health worker) has a key role as organiser of the development of the farm and homestead farming. He reports that villagers are embracing the enormous behaviour change involved in moving from maize to permaculture. The availability of “food every day” is gradually becoming a reality.

In 2025 the Gumbi permaculture farmers will be offering to other local farmers training in sustainable farming and cooking at the demonstration farm and its new teaching kitchen. We need to pay the farmers to do this work. Any contribution you can make would be gratefully received. Please use the “Gumbi” button on the Donate page on this website. All funds go direct to the project in Malawi.