Peter Senge is hosting a "bring your own lunch" talk at MIT where Mwalimu Musheshe, the Chairman of the Uganda Rural Development Training Programme (URDT) will be the featured speaker. Musheshe uses many of the principles of systems thinking in his amazing work at URDT. This is going to be a fantastic open discussion and dialogue. Here's the "invitation" to the event, thanks to Bryan Smith, one of the co-authors of Peter's latest book, The Necessary Revolution. (I hope they'll get into a topic about how environmentally sustainable URDT itself is. Perhaps I'll ask that question!).
Mwalimu Musheshe Peter Senge
Mwalimu Musheshe, Co-founder and Chairman
Uganda Rural Development &
Training Program (URDT)
Friday, May 15, 12-2
MIT Tang Building/E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Room 345.
This event is FREE. You're invited to bring your own lunch.
Come meet Mwalimu Musheshe, co-founder and chairman of URDT. Learn about their visionary, systemic approach to development in Uganda – a model for Africa and the world. URDT provides an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches. URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work. Musheshe will be presenting and engaging in dialogue with participants in this session, hosted by Peter Senge. More information about URDT is at: http://www.urdt.net/
A map to the location can be viewed here:
URDT is without doubt one of the most successful rural development organizations in eastern Africa. What was one of the poorest districts in the entire region 15 years ago is now flourishing due to the pioneering work of URDT.
Peter Senge and many founding members of the Society for Organizational Learning have known Musheshe since the mid 80’s, when he and a cadre of the initial Ugandan leaders came to Boston to learn about systems thinking, mental models, and creating personal and shared visions.
Rather than follow the more typical aid strategies of technical and humanitarian assistance, URDT’s founders challenged a core mental model. “The biggest obstacle to development in Uganda,” says Musheshe, “was fatalism, people who believed that they could do nothing to shape their future. All the outside help in the world would not change this - it only reinforced it.”
For more than 20 years, the URDT campus has been developing as a flourishing hub of learning, collaboration and progress in the Kibaale district. The Girls School, launched in 2000, selects and enrolls girls from the poorest of the poor families in the district, and empowers them to fully embrace this rare opportunity to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.
Programs at the girls’ school and the Africa Rural University for Women uniquely link education to community development. The girls and women develop and deliver programs in villages to people of all ages - on topics like creating shared vision, improving health, farming, eliminating corruption, and the empowerment of girls and women. They also develop crucial skills to grow new crops, start new enterprises, and create prosperity and health for their families and villages. They learn organic farming methods by working on a 35-acre demonstration farm at the URDT campus, and participate in radio broadcasts on a community radio station that reaches 2 million listeners.
URDT provides an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches. URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work.
That's the invitation. And here's a link to my latest write-up about URDT's amazing innovative approach.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY
Clear twenty or so 9 square feet (3' x 3') little mini farms. Develop one using your mother's organic techniques. Develop one according to MIT's brightest agricultural engineers. Likewise Michigan State's brightest. Distribute the remaining seventeen in such a way to feel certain you have captured the best possible solution with this test set.
Make it a contest. (MAKE IT A CONTEST.) Clear all of the farms in exactly the same manner. Documentation. Photos posted online.
Then prepare the soil according to that farm's owners. Water each according to design dictates. (Be very, VERY jealously detailed about adherence to the owner's wishes. This is vitally important to insure success.)
Use chemicals on the soil as prescribed by the owners of that farm. Exactly follow their schedule. Do not impose your own values or control on their farm. Do it EXACTLY as they say. Plant them all exactly the same. (Gather and document the seeds. Photos please. Make the seeds as identical as possible. Get all of those agricultural engineers to help.)
Then do your level best to cultivate the highest yield for each farm. Document everything. Journals please. Details please. Observations please. I want blogs. I want video. I want a compelling summer read. I want to invite every good ole farmer in the United States to weigh in.
On a weekly basis, count and identify all of the bugs (all of them) that can be physically counted on each farm. Again, photos please. Matter of fact, put the photos up online, and I'll personally do some of the counting.
Document the yield. A photo of every fruit. Every vegetable, along with a diagram of where it grew, and the lifetime photos for it.
Draw a grid on each farm. After harvest, take the 16 obious soil samples. Photos and diagram intersection points labelled and posted online please. Send the samples to MSU, MIT and the other top notch agricultural schools. Send a set to Harvard.
Publish all the results except for the yields. Then run your contest. Ask each team to post their prediction for the winning farm. Then post the yields.
May the brightest prove to be that.
Posted by: Dave | May 25, 2009 at 01:48 PM
This one is directly related to the success of the Uganda Rural Development Training Programme (URDT).
If this were my program, this is what I would do. I would find as many Gravely farming tool implements that I could possibly find. I would start with Google and Craigslist for every city in the U.S. of A. The older the better. They are legendary. Pure engineering quality.
I would buy a good PC and a few copies of SolidWorks 2009. I would hire a couple capable mechanical engineers. Then I would reverse engineer as much of that Gravely technology as I legally could, and manufacture it - enmasse - and sell it all over Africa.
You are going to need the right tools to turn Africa into an agricultural success. Here are the ones that we used:
http://www.pivot.net/~jpierce/gravely_tractors.htm
Posted by: David Lance | May 06, 2009 at 06:25 PM