The garden they extended after we left
The tools were tested at the Green Vocational College in Buwama in 2025, at the invitation of Afrika Rise, who have supported the school since 2008. The question was whether they hold up somewhere they were not designed for.
They do, and the strongest evidence is not what happened during the week. It is what happened afterwards: the garden was extended by the students themselves, with nobody there to ask them to.
The method does not need us in the room. Everything below follows from that.
Seven minutes from the Green Vocational College in Buwama. Three groups, each with their own set of tools, teaching each other soil, water harvesting, waste and composting, and turning bare ground into a garden. The film opens on the Buwama section.
How the week ran+
One permaculture course, one school garden, one week. The school was split into three groups, each given a topic and the tools, and told that their job was to teach everyone else. Then we stood back, which was the actual experiment.
At the end they presented their work to the whole school. When it was translated for us we assumed they had been studying these topics for weeks.
What we did about the language+
We were warned in advance that some students could not write and that most spoke Luganda rather than English. The teaching material was prepared in Luganda and English beforehand, adapted to local conditions, and checked by a Ugandan permaculturist who came with us.
The school, and who built it+
Afrika Rise has supported the site since 2008 and carries the infrastructure and the staff. It is being built into Uganda's first green vocational college. They bring the place and the local roots. We bring the tools and the way of learning. Neither of us could do this alone, and neither of us is trying to. The 2025 week in full is on the Story page.
Uganda is writing the permaculturist into its national training system
Together with Welthungerhilfe we helped start work on a national Assessment and Training Package, the official curriculum for training permaculturists at vocational colleges, developed with the Ugandan Ministry of Education.
It is in review, and we have given detailed feedback so that the finished modules carry the ethics and the systemic design thinking rather than a list of gardening techniques. The ministry carries it. We do not.
A curriculum needs somewhere to happen. The sites and the trainers are missing, and that is a very specific gap.
A Hub that is not an alternative to the school system but the missing part of it.
Why this matters more than one school+
Over forty percent of Uganda's land is affected by soil degradation, and the majority of people live from subsistence farming. Low yields push people to clear more land, which increases erosion, which lowers yields again.
A recognised profession is how a country stops treating regeneration as a project and starts treating it as work that people are trained and paid to do. What Uganda does not yet have is the places to learn it in.
Nobody installs a Super Hub. Everybody builds one.
Around twenty Ugandan permaculturists, the teachers and students of the college, and bamboo builders from several places.
Week one is a bamboo camp. Weeks two and three run in halves: mornings on the Infinity Tools, the permaculture designs and the knowledge system, afternoons taking what was made straight into sessions with the students.
Then a Permablitz with the whole school, the designs go into the ground, and the village comes for a community day where each new thing is explained by the people who made it.
A place that is a Hub because it was built like one, not because we called it one.
Why the afternoons matter more than the mornings+
A method that has only been discussed is not a method yet. Every idea developed in the morning gets tested the same afternoon with actual students, and comes back changed. Three weeks of that is worth more than a year of curriculum writing, and it is the difference between a training and a rehearsal.
The business module+
Participants also learn to make Beenius sets themselves: sourcing local wax, designing packaging, working out how to sell to schools or in their communities, and planning how to make more.
This is not a side activity. It is the difference between a tool people receive and a tool people can produce. Anyone who leaves knowing how to make the wax is no longer dependent on us for anything, which is the whole idea.
What goes into the ground+
Mound beds and raised beds, a working compost system, a permaculture design for terracing the slope, and natural ways of holding and directing water. Not a demonstration plot. A site the school keeps using.
The model on the table is the instruction for the building
The geometry that makes a model stand on a table is the same geometry that makes a structure stand in a garden, so a Beenius model is a working blueprint and its proportions scale straight up. That has already been done here once, with bamboo and locally made metal connectors, in an afternoon, by people who had never built one at full size.
Week one takes it further, with local bamboo experts and partners including the Social Innovation Academy: traditional weaving techniques, upcycled bottles and bicycle tubes, modular connectors, and whatever else turns out to work.
What stands afterwards is not a demonstration. It is a park of structures the school uses as shade, shelter and learning islands, and a set of methods anyone can copy.
MODELtoREALITY as something other people can run, in their own place, without us.
Why bamboo and not eucalyptus+
Uganda grows excellent bamboo and builds almost entirely with eucalyptus. Eucalyptus drains groundwater, its leaf litter suppresses other plants, and it is usually harvested by clear cutting, which opens the soil and releases what was stored in it.
Bamboo is a grass. Single mature culms are cut and the root system stays intact and puts up new growth. The forest is never opened. The gap is not the plant, it is the knowledge of how to build with it, and that is a gap you can close in a week with the right people in one place.
Three weeks make one place. They also make the thing every other place runs on.
Everyone who comes has a site of their own: a school, a training centre, a piece of land, a community. Three weeks of building something real is the most persuasive argument this concept has, and they leave with the practice rather than a licence.
The more important output is the one nobody sees. Everything gets captured while it happens: the designs, the connection details, the failures, and short films made in Luganda with the participants speaking, subtitled outward into other languages.
That is what a place anywhere else actually needs. Not encouragement, but the particular things that were worked out by people with the same constraints.
This is the part we are asking to be funded. After ten years of building these tools we know what works and what wastes a week, and Buwama is where that stops being ours and becomes something the network can use.
The next place starts from where this one finished, instead of from zero.
The knowledge system+
The college has a solar powered computer lab and a stable connection, which is why the next step happens there: a permaculture knowledge system in local languages that people can both draw on and add to. Plant diseases, natural fertilisers, upcycling, turning a curriculum requirement into a lesson that works, and how to use the Infinity Tools in a specific context.
The point is the second direction. A certified permaculturist in the region contributes what they found out, and it becomes available to everyone else. Buwama is where that loop gets tested with people in the room, before anyone tries to scale it.
Where Maja and Mojo fit+
The assistants built for the 2025 week were the first form of Maja and Mojo, and they showed us what the next form has to be, which is not a chatbot.
Buwama is where that next form would meet twenty teachers who will say plainly when it is useless. That is worth more than any amount of development in Berlin. Whether it will be far enough along by then is not decided.
Why this college, and not somewhere easier
A Super Hub is a larger site that trains the people running the smaller ones. Buwama qualifies for a reason nothing else currently does: it is a vocational college in a country that is about to recognise the profession this work belongs to. The training is going to happen there anyway. What we bring is the way of learning it, and a site built by the people who will use it.
And this is the part that matters most to us. Everything else on this site describes a network. After Buwama, part of it becomes something a stranger on the other side of the world can start from. Not because we opened a branch, but because what was worked out in one place was written down properly and given away.
50,000 euro, and a place exists that did not exist
The money does not buy a building. The buildings get built by the people who come. It covers getting them there and housing them for three weeks, the materials and the plants, the people who run it, the filming and translation, and the months of preparation before anyone arrives.
What stays behind is a site, a park of structures, a garden the school keeps using, and the documentation in Luganda that lets the next place start from here.
If that is something you would want to be part of, write to us. One conversation, one place that opens.
Talk to us about BuwamaAt the end of three weeks the ground holds more water, more species and more food than at the beginning, and it keeps doing so after everyone leaves.
Nobody is trained here in order to be certified by us. They are trained in order to go home and do it, and to be able to make the tools themselves.
Everything made there, the designs, the films, the bamboo details and the mistakes, is published for anyone to use.
A garden that grew without us, a country that needs somewhere to teach this, and three weeks that leave both a place and a manual behind.
Everything else on this site describes what a Regeneration Hub is. This is the page where one of them gets a date, a place and a name.