Kufunda Learning Village, Zimbabwe

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Kufunda Learning Village in Zimbabwe, located near the capital of Harare, was created in 2005 by Marianne Knuth for the purpose of creating strong, healthy communities that are responsible for their own future. In addition to cultural growth, Kufunda has embarked on an exploration of technologies to meet its most immediate needs. Kufunda residents focus on building self-sufficiency in two main areas: agriculture and community infrastructure. Knuth explained, “We are a small group of people who have decided to create a learning village aimed at the creation of locally rooted solutions to community self-reliance challenges. A starting assumption for my work here is that people already know how to work in creative and self-sufficient ways, and that the challenge is to help them access that knowledge—and the self-confidence to act on it—generating concrete and often surprising results in the process.” In time, Kufunda’s residents hope they can transfer their knowledge to neighboring villages that wish to create similar self-sufficiency.

In the face of periodic political unrest, villages like Kufunda have a greater need for self- reliance, perhaps, than any other communities. Residents have begun to investigate the developmentment of ecological projects such as renewable energy, organic farming, ecological building, and composting toilets. The Kufunda Learning Village Web site has reported, “Ecological sanitation is a system that makes use of human excreta and turns it into something useful, which can be used to grow plants or trees. By now all the toilets at the village are of this type. Our simplest compost toilet can now be built for roughly 10 U.S. dollars—an important factor when working with financially poor rural communities.” Not only are Kufunda’s plans cost-effective, but they make every use of natural clean-running systems.

The Kufunda Learning Village has already begun to run its main electronic systems on solar power—the satellite Internet was the village’s first system to run on solar energy. Kufunda’s residents have an advantage over richer, more industrialized communities: They own no preexisting energy or waste management systems to tear down. The Kufunda Learning Village continues to find the best solutions to its specific environmental issues and, in the process, provides a good example of building efficient and simple technologies that foster sustainability.