By Rosemary Morrow
As you read this, Greta Carroll and Sarah Boulle are in Bangladesh contributing to the next phase of P4R training in refugee camps. They are building on the Outcomes document from our PDC training in refugee camps in 2019 across three continents.
They are working with Bangladesh Association of Sustainable Development (BASD) to build the capacity and quality of their training to be able to deliver permaculture design courses to NGOs – local and international – working in refugee camps. After their advanced permaculture course and a teacher training course, with the BASD trainers they will offer a PDC for NGO staff at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh for the Rohingya refugees living there. The results will be carefully monitored and evaluated for scaling up to other NGOs working with refugees in camps.
To offer permaculture teaching training to refugee settlements where people are not in camps, Alfred Decker with Habiba Youssef, Yau Fan, and Sonita Mbah delivered a teacher training course in Spain to refugees with permaculture training from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and African countries.
The results will be fascinating to understand where and how these refugees will take their knowledge and teaching skills. Their evaluative comments are extremely positive.
These two initiatives are catering for the world of refugees where some people are in camps and others in settlements and permaculture training will be delivered either by refugees or by NGO staff according to these different contexts.
After monitoring the two approaches we hope to have some extremely valuable data on how and where to put our resources in the future where we put refugees as the center of our concern and are convinced that permaculture offers them valuable information and skills. It is conceivable that we will need both these approaches.
We’d like the outcomes to change present practice and give skills and independence to refugees to change their world to make it more liveable, cleaner and economic.