Exciting times at Welsh Permaculture practice ‘Sector39’ who are celebrating 10 years of delivering PDC’s in venues across Wales and further afield as well as establishing themselves at their new home Dragons Co-op in Mid Wales.  Sector39 have successfully launched thier first full PDC in Uganda attracting  farmers, teachers and community leaders from Uganda, Kenya and Burundi. 
 
Sector39 are working closely with the Wales-Uganda charity, Dolen Ffermio, who give support, training and practical help to farmers, villagers and orphans in what is one of the poorest Africa nations, still slowly recovering from decades of civil war, internal upheavals and instability.  
 
Director of Sector39, teacher Steve Jones first encourntered permaculture many years ago when working in Zimbabwe and has reatained the ambition to reciprocate in some way. With this course we aim to positively impact the lives of East Africans, not only thorugh teaching permaculture but also to provide the tools for Ugandan’s to move towards  becoming diploma students and subsequently teachers able to convene and certificate their own courses. We will provide the tools to become permaculture teachers, and hopefully create subsequent opportunites for exchange visist to the UK as part of the education.
 
Sector39 has invested in the costs of sending out a training team to Uganda for three weeks and thanks to the support from our Crowdfunder which has raised an incredible £860 along with a donation of £1000 the course fees are provided for 12 Africans to attend the course. Additionally our generous and anonymous donor has also provided the course with 10 copies of 3 brilliant and very apt books for our students as a resource, which they can keep. The books feature important and practical information for our students including information about acacias- nitrogen fixing leguminous plants- an ideal resource for agro forestry. 
 
The upcoming PDC will include contributions from Moses Kitembo, an agro forestry specialist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal plants. The donated books will be an excellent resource for Moses who will be talking about some of his favourite plants– which we hope to record and disseminate through audio capture. 
 
Keep up to date at Sector39.co.uk with our progress in Uganda and the exciting practical elements of our work as our design students progress in their studies via our project blog. 
We plan to return to Uganda next year and support progress of diploma studies, to run more courses and to gather material for our planned teachers handbook for the region. For those of you that would like to study your PDC in Uganda to take part in this exciting and developing project, contact Steve.