Looking to make your site more sustainable? Looking to live lightly, reduce your ecological footprint, and perhaps even give back to nature? Interested in reducing your dependence and become more self-sufficient? Wanting to create abundance from the resources available to you?
Afristar offers consulting services in permaculture design, site analysis, and environmental design, to help you achieve your goals of sustainability. Where applicable, Afristar can assist in program development for community engagement, training of staff and stakeholders, or the creation of land-based microenterprise on a site. Whether you are a homestead owner, a business, a community group, or a municipality, Afristar can provide professional design services to address local needs and stated priorities.
Permaculture Design
Afristar Foundation is experienced in developing permaculture designs for individual pieces of land, community and public spaces, as well as broad-scale areas such as entire wards or municipalities. The process of creating a design would incorporate the following:
- Stakeholder meeting
- Site analysis
- Site Mapping
- Permaculture Design & Report
Permaculture is a branch of ecological design and ecological engineering which develops sustainable human settlements and self-maintained agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.
Permaculture design emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It asks the question, “Where does this element go? How can it be placed for the maximum benefit of the system?” To answer this question, the central concept of permaculture is maximizing useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on each separate element, but rather on the relationships created among elements by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts.
Permaculture design therefore seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input by building systems with maximal benefits between design elements to achieve a high level of synergy. Permaculture designs evolve over time by taking into account these relationships and elements and can become extremely complex systems that produce a high density of food and materials with minimal input.
Permaculture draws on the application of ecological theory to analyze the characteristics of a farm, garden, or home site. Each element of a design is carefully analyzed in terms of its needs, outputs, and properties. Design elements are then assembled in relation to one another so that the products of one element feed the needs of adjacent elements. Such relationships are organized in spatial patterns common in natural systems.
Permaculture design can also work in conjunction with Holistic Goal Formation, ensuring that design outcomes are in line with major objectives and aims.