2000-09-20 When you began work in a new community, how did you quickly get an overall understanding of the nature and workings of that community to form the base for your future work? Our first task in a new location is to learn about the lives, needs, and priorities of the people there. Beginning as a...
2003-04-20 Politically and economically, the ten plus years our family has been in Haiti have been rather tumultuous. There was a coup in October of 1991 against President Jean Bertrand Aristide, then four years of crushing embargo when gasoline cost $20 a gallon and neither tools nor parts could be...
2001-01-20 SRI involves the use of certain management practices which together provide better growing conditions for rice plants, particularly in the root zone, than those for plants grown under traditional practices. We recently learned about a method of raising rice that produces substantially higher...
2004-01-20 The area of management may seem foreign to many agricultural development workers, but good management can be an effective ministry. Most people spend the bulk of their hours under someone’s management. There is no greater opportunity than that provided by management to make a positive impact on...
2006-07-20 Several technical considerations must be taken into account when attempting to help economically disenfranchised families and communities initiate and sustain production of soybeans or any new crop. Technical assistance cannot be done in isolation; one must provide more than just information...
2009-07-20 Many of you have graciously taken the time to fill out the seed harvest report form that accompanies each mailing of seeds from our seed bank. In reading reports from people in our network, we want to learn whether the seeds we are sending out have improved the lives of poor small-holder farmers....
2004-07-01 Training in tire gardening was done with women in Mauritania. After the training, each woman was given several small packets of seeds and encouraged to start a garden. When we arrived in Kiffa, the only vegetable gardens that could be found were in an ancient riverbed (known as a Wadi) northwest...
2005-07-20 Over the years ECHO has been asked to give advice concerning whether or not to use hybrid seed. We carry very few hybrid varieties in our seed bank because we expect people who receive seed to multiply it locally. Now some new information about this old question, specifically about maize, has...
2004-07-01 We read an article in Appropriate Technology (Volume 28, No. 3; July/September 2001) about farmers in Niger who used bottle caps to distribute tiny amounts of fertilizer. Despite drought conditions, farmers who used this technique harvested 50 to 100 percent more millet than those who did not.