Village-Level Capacity Building Skill Development Village Level Capacity building: NEED-Burma works to address food insecurity by facilitating and conducting capacity-building workshops at the village-level in Burma and along the Thai-Burma border. Workshops address biodiversity loss, sustainable agriculture techniques and ways to prevent further environmental degradation.
MFI School Alumni Network: Model Farm Initiative (MFI) School alumni return to their local villages where they begin to organize their communities around sustainable agriculture practices and to promote environmental conservation.
Students organize and facilitate workshops and training for peers, local farmers and community members. The topics of the workshops are of the student’s choosing, but integrate core concepts and information gained at the MFI School.
Sample workshop topics:
NEED’s in-country Alumni Network Coordinator monitors alumni activities so that NEED can provide any required technical support.
MFI Alumni also go on to begin their own model farms in Burma. NEED currently supports its alumni and their model farms in Arakan, Mon and Kachin State.
Housing, Land and Property Rights Initiative: One of the many networks in which NEED participates is the Housing, Land and Property Rights Initiative (HLPRI), coordinated by Center on Housing Rights and Eviction (COHRE). NEED assists in training community-level organizers to document housing and property rights abuses, including forced evictions and land confiscation in Burma.
Video Documentation: NEED students are trained at the Model Farm Initiative School in video documentation techniques and produce educational videos in their local languages on sustainable agriculture techniques, such as composting, mud-brick making, organic pesticides and seed saving.
The videos that students produce are used to educate, train and mobilize communities to reduce harmful environmental and agriculture practices in Burma. Click here to watch some of the videos.
