A farm built to teach, which makes operations the first variable.
Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Educational farm platform, 100,000 square metres.
Situation Source record
Participated with an NGO to establish an educational platform for younger generation farmers.
Challenge
Build a working farm that also has to work as a classroom, for people who will run it after the project team has gone.
What JYCO examined
Who runs the system day to day, how a young farmer is trained on it, and how knowledge transfers without the original team on site. Crop and structure decisions followed from that.
Issues identified
Knowledge transfer was the governing constraint. Crop and structure choices that suited experienced operators would have failed with the people the platform was built to train, so operations and labour had to lead the design rather than follow it. Variables in play: operations, labour, crop.
Approach
Treat the platform as something to be run by people who did not build it: the training and handover model decides whether it keeps working after the project team leaves.