Transformative Value
Chains Development and Education
The 2025 PFL builds upon a successful pilot composed of DeKUT and MIT students and faculty in January 2024. Entitled “Calabashing: Innovating with Gourds,” it focused on one organic material—the gourd, an icon of African culture as a lens into innovation.
The second PFL, field class components was held in Jan 2025 again with 38 DeKUT and 9 MIT students at seven different sites. The internship component was rescheduled due to travel challenges faced by foreign students in universities in the USA. The 2026 PFL field class will be in January 2026 and will be followed by a summer internship component in June to August, 2026.
The class is organized around a problem which local students are embarking on solving. Students will be placed into these projects to work under mixed teams of academic and non-academic instructors, with very clear matching of their skills and career goals to specific examinable practical deliverables.
The PFL has two tracks or intakes: the field class in January and the internship between June and August.
🇿🇼 Detecting and mapping groundwater hydrology for borehole drilling
Design + implement grass and tree seedling projects for zero-grazing/thatching and reforstration and decarbonization
Design + build modernised Indigenous buildings using wooden poles, grass, and selected soils
Design and deploy devices to deter monkeys from invading farms bordering conservancies 🇰🇪
Design + Fabricate Molds for Making Concrete Fencing Posts as an Antidote Against Fencing Induced Deforestation
Establishment of a hatchery for the African lungfish and other indigenous fish to enable its introduction in commercial aquaculture and repopulation
Research, develop, and implement solution to the Golden Apple Snail which decimate rice seedlings, forming farmers to replant 🇰🇪
Establishment of aquaponics (integrated multitrophic aquaculture) as a sustainable food production system in desert/drought-prone environments 🇳🇦 🇿🇼
Design a business model for and launch cooking oil venture, targeting locally produced ground nuts and sunflower
Design a business model for and launch a carpentry + welding venture that designs and makes beehives, box-bailers, chick- and fish-cages, and other farm essentials
Make a low-cost fish feed machine
Making + installing an automated fish feeding mechanism to control fish overfeeding and underfeeding
Design + build fish rearing pond with a greenhouse cover
Develop + deploy IoT device to measure and subsequently enable control or intervention of pond water parameters
Design + develop auxiliary systems for large-scale water recirculation and cleaning in fish rearing ponds
Venture to train, supply, + manage staff to run projects and maintain homes of diaspora-based citizens
🇰🇪 Design + build fish rearing pond with a greenhouse cover
Design and make a simple and low-cost furnace for recycled metal casting
Design + develop shoe sole molding machine
Design a business model for and launch a venture that makes food processing and musical equipment from gourds
Design a business model for and launch the animal feeds and organic fertilizer pelletizing venture, targeting local crops and farm waste
