Fundacion Paraguaya's Financially Self-Sufficient Organic Farm School

The Farm School understands that being enterprising means identifying and confronting challenges head-on. Here’s what tops its list of current challenges:

• Maintaining Self-sufficiency: As the owner of the Farm School, Fundación Paraguaya still provides the school with support, both in-kind and financial, when needed. It remains committed to growing the school’s self- reliance, to diversifying its revenue stream, and creating a model that can be transported to other impoverished rural areas worldwide.
  
  
• Teaching Teachers: Currently, many of the school’s teachers, instructors, and staff come from the surrounding communities. Many arrive with a good understanding of rural, agricultural Paraguay, but they still need to be trained by the foundation in how to best use experiential learning to develop entrepreneurial skills. “Before you can educate the children, you need to start educating the teachers,” notes Nik Kafka.
  
  
• Supplies: Although the school has computers, internet access, and training software, basic classroom instruction is done with rudimentary supplies. Having only a limited supply of even pencils and paper makes it challenging to teach the latest approaches to business management.
  

In 2005, Fundación Paraguaya created the sister organization Teach A Man To Fish (TAMTF) to help other communities, both regionally and internationally, develop similar educational institutions. Part of TAMTF’s work is crafting a toolkit for each participating school, which has enabled parts of the Farm School to be effectively replicated at Escuela Agrícola San Isidoro Labrador in Paraguay as well as in seven other schools in Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and South Africa.

TAMTF emphasizes four elements: educate teachers about sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship; focus the curriculum on both academic learning and business training; identify niches in the local market that teachers and students can use to create workable business plans; and engage all stakeholders—from students to teachers to families to the nearby residents—to position the school for success.

“The Financially Self-Sufficient Organic Farm School is not a pilot, it’s a paradigm,” says Nik proudly. “It’s self- sufficient, which means it is endlessly replicable.... It’s literally a revolution in the making and with potentially the same impact as the microfinance revolution. For the people who got in early on microfinance, they’re the ones with the biggest smiles on their faces today. And the people who get in early on education that pays for itself will be the people smiling very happily in twenty or thirty years, too.”