- info@solucoesnaturais.org.br
Global Academy Hubs for Co-innovation, Training and Capacity Building
Together with farmer organizations and other local and international stakeholders, GA co-creates Hubs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Here we localize co-innovation and capacity building in cultivation, scaling, value addition, market access and blended finance. The local development of robust proofs of concepts scale from the Hubs across farmer organizations, stakeholder networks and national extension systems. These Hubs are located in the existing infrastructure of cooperatives and other types of farmer organizations.
Zambia
In Zambia, GA in collaboration with its co-founder NOW Partners Foundation successfully co-created three GA Hubs for Co-Innovation, Capacity Building and Implementation in collaboration with Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture, local farmers and Valponasca Learning Farm of the Salesian Sisters and the Jesuit’s Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre as well as other civil society and private sector stakeholders.
The Hubs pioneered the co-innovation between local practices and India‘s Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming (APCNF). The farmers involved already achieved significantly higher yields at much lower costs and enabled cultivation during the dry seasons when most farmers typically stop cultivation. The innovation include the shift from monocrops to multi-cropping, which ensures that farmers and their communities benefit from high quality nutrition at low cost.
With the help of European development funding, GA will soon expand locally adapted versions of Natural Farming to eight Hubs, including in the strategically important Lobito corridor that connects Zambia to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The locally adapted cultivation methodology, along with capacity building in value addition, market access, finance and management training are being integrated into the core curriculum of Zambia’s national agriculture college system that serves 5,000 practitioners yearly. Value addition production will integrate farmers beyond local markets into the public procurement for healthy and regenerative school meals and private sector markets for coffee. These and other Hub activities and blended finance projects offer integral models how a new mainstream can be developed.
Sri Lanka
In Sri Lanka, a country hard hit by natural catastrophes and a past government that due to wasting its foreign currency reserves devastated the food system by forcing farmers to do chemical input-free farming without transition training and preparation, GA and its co-founder NOW Partners Foundation co-created three Hubs for Co-Innovation, Capacity Building and Implementation in collaboration with local partners.
These partners include a rich ecosystem of organizations and networks that have a significant impact on the national food system that is in desperate need of innovation. At the center of this partnership is Sarvodaya, the country’s largest and oldest village movement that has supported over 15,000 villages over the past 60 years. Other partners include its microfinance bank Sarvodaya Development Finance (SDF), the country’s leading Colombo University, the country’s largest healthcare exporter Barberyn Ayurveda Resorts and John Keells, one of the country’s largest retail groups that will introduce its farmers to locally adapted Natural Farming solutions and will buy all resulting produce and value added production for its many stores.
Also here, local farmers co-innovate more successful, locally adapted cultivation with the help of farmer-coaches of India’s Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming (APCNF). In the future Brazilian agroforestry approaches will be integrated. And recently the Hubs were invited to advise a large national project supporting the region around the country’s most important watershed.
Brazil
GA and its co-founder NOW Partners Foundation have worked in Brazil since 1997, co-creating and strengthening Latin America’s first sustainability business alliances and collaborating with civil society and social entrepreneurs in initiatives to strengthen social, environmental and economic regeneration.
