There have been many posts here on planning, and the importance of planning.  Before going into the details of this post, I want to warn you about one common error regarding planning.  It is that too often people look at planning as a one-time deal.  They plan a project and then start executing it.  They will not go back and review the original plan and never make adjustments to the plan when changes are being made to the project.  Don’t do this.  Make sure you write down your plan and that you revise it periodically and make updates when necessary. Because [...]

It is very rare to find university students with concrete plans for the future.  Yes, you will meet many who may tell you exactly what they intend to do, where they will be working, and how their career will be laid out, but they have no plans to get there.  There are exceptions, though.  These very few, remain laser-focused on their future.  You will not see them hanging around in campus cafes or bars, they are too busy planning their future.  One of these is Emmaculate.   As you may remember from our last post with Emmaculate, she is studying Agricultural Science, with [...]

For the past weeks, we have been in West Africa, talking to people in Ghana, Cameroon, and Sierra Leone.  Without leaving that region completely behind, we are going to jump east and drop in on Ivan Bavuga, from the Western Region of Uganda. His farm, Ivan Balinda's Agriculture, Research, and Innovation farm, is a mixed farm including crops and animals, sitting on four hectares of land.  Ivan has been involved in agriculture for about three years and did not take the usual route into this career.  As I have mentioned many times on these pages, most people enter agriculture as per default, that [...]

As mentioned in the previous post, Hope has cultivated 3 acres out of her 25 and is now planning with her team, to expand the cultivation to have the whole 25 acres under crop within the next two years.  She will have to clear the land and prepare it, but since it is flat, fertile, and with good access to water, then that will not be too much for them. Hope is currently cultivating tomatoes, groundnuts (peanuts), and corn with her team, on the three acres.   Her plans are to grow the area under cultivation and she would like to add [...]

We already met Ms. Belawu at Diva Farms, run by her and two of her friends.  As we learned last time the farm is already divided into two areas, the first of cash crops and the second of vegetables.  Later they will be adding a greenhouse for hydroponic farming.  At this point, I wanted to learn a bit more about their vegetable garden, their organic processes, and the challenges they have faced and are facing. “As I told you before, the vegetable garden is 5 acres, and maintaining it without chemicals is of course a challenge.  Our philosophy is to grow healthy [...]

We already met Hope and her team from Lungi City, Pewulay Village in the northern province of Sierra Leone. In my first post on them, I mentioned Hope is very much involved with Global Children Humanitarian Organization (Orphanage).  Since 22 years ago, Hope and her family have been supporting the orphanage, and since she started developing her own farm, her efforts there have been motivated by the orphanage.  “I wasn’t in the position to support the orphanage with direct financial assistance to the extent I would have liked to”, she tells me.  “But with the farm, there is so much more [...]