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4.2 Adopt an educational institute
The second possibility is to adopt an educational institute. Again, I regret to say that this also is not my own idea but one that I discovered in an article in the Vancouver Sun. The article describes a partnership between the new Mzuzu University in Malawi and the Agriculture Institute of Canada. Land had been donated by the government for the university, but because Malawi is desperately poor, the university cannot rely on funding but needs to be self-sustaining. The land was already occupied by farmers and was scrubby at best.
The whole point of the university demands that its land also be used for practical research to find new crops, new varieties of old crops and more sustainable techniques to help ease the chronic hunger and recurring famine in the land.
Thus with the help from the Canadian experts . . ., [the partners have] come up with a plan to pare down the acreage they want to work with . . . . They've earmarked space for the campus, an adjacent community and roads to serve them. And they've come up with a strategy to deal with the ravages of deforestation that scars virtually all of the land they inherited, as well as to develop its productive capacity to feed the university and make some money to support it. . . . T]hey are working to establish a nation-wide professional institute for agricultural and forestry scientists in Malawi. (Cayo, 2006)
The Malawi University obviously needs help in just about every way. BCIT could form a similar partnership with a technical institute or university in Africa. Much of what was discussed in the previous section about adopting a village is applicable here as well.
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