Twenty years after most of the world embraced the notion of
sustainable development, the big trends are still pushing us over the brink. Our demands on the planet’s carrying capacity are more than can be maintained and still growing, mostly to the advantage of those already comfortable, while over a third of the world’s population has too little and the gap between rich and poor is growing almost everywhere. But there is light in some of the least expected places. In a village in rural Tanzania, one of world’s poorest countries, a small and poorly funded group of nuns, teachers and volunteers have been gradually building a model of the solution. Starting with the needs of children with disabilities or no access to post-primary education, they have created a school and, with their students, an intertwined set of related operations that now amount to a community economy that is both self-reliant and outward spreading.

The Imani Vocational Training Centre and its associated primary school, now has food from its own self-built drip-irrigated garden, piggery, and fish farm, facilities constructed with its own innovative bricks, welding and carpentry, clothes from its own tailoring, income from its own products and savings from its creative use of wastes from one activity as resources for another. As host Greg John points out in this documentary, the approach has not just made the school more sustainable and resilient; it has also demonstrated a successful approach to education and community development that is reproducible and expandable to larger scale applications.

What Sister Placida Mosha and her colleagues have and are accomplishing at Imani deserves celebration, support and shameless copying.

Dr Robert Gibson,
Professor of Environment and Resource Studies
University of Waterloo