Project: Build a Village

Last year, we introduced our Build-a-Village project, for which the American Sudanese Partnerships invited us to create agricultural and business models for new villages that will be started in Darfur, Sudan. We began Phase I by securing a site for a demonstration village on our campus. We have built two domes and started a third. Now in Phase II, we have begun developing a business model for agriculture, focusing on cash crops such as sorghum and millet, and bees for pollination. We also started our demonstration garden with corn, tomatoes and peppers, and our BAB member built a worm-farm eco-system in the greenhouse of our campus biology department as part of the demonstration garden. Worm castings are collected and used as fertilizer for seedlings. Various aspects of our model village provide experimentation tools that can be adapted and applied around the world. We also hosted discussions about the global market economy with students and community members who have visited the village.