Alton Climate Action Network
Since 2020 Alton Climate Action Network (ACAN) has been working with a charity (the Gumbi Education Fund) helping the Gumbi villages in central Malawi in southern Africa, where most families are subsistence farmers growing maize as a monoculture crop. This requires expensive chemical fertiliser and reliable rains, without which the crop fails. With climate change and price increases for fertiliser, it is a precarious livelihood.
ACAN donors paid for 15 young people to be trained in mixed farming at the wonderfully-named Permaculture Paradise Institute, growing a wide range of local crops, fruit and nut trees without chemical fertilisers. In 2021, the money raised from Alton helped to buy them land – the Gumbi-Alton farm – and they have successfully grown many crops and planted young trees, supporting about 50 families with food. They have built a store, a classroom, and water storage for irrigation, and been able to buy pigs, rabbits and goats, using their manure as fertiliser.
ACAN’s next – urgent – objective is to provide tools and seeds for villagers to use sustainable agriculture on their small homestead plots. The farmers we have trained are teaching other villagers their permaculture techniques, to spread their methods.
This link is to the recording of our December 2022 online meeting with the farmers in Malawi and the Permaculture Paradise Institute https://youtu.be/xWQeaTX4d6o ‘Walking beside Gumbi young farmers on a journey to Paradise’
You can DONATE through the GUMBI button on the donation page on this website to help our work to develop sustainable agriculture in the Gumbi villages of Malawi. This is our climate justice project: the 20 million Malawians are responsible for just 0.04% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but are victims of climate breakdown caused mainly by rich countries.
