Marianne Knuth

Marianne Knuth helps rural people to build self-reliance at multiple levels: financial, practical, material, social, psychological, and spiritual.

Zimbabwe today is in political and economic crisis. The currency is seriously devalued, and unemployment is skyrocketing. Official figures say 50 to 75 percent of Zimbabweans need food aid. Unemployment is estimated at over 70 percent and rising. Furthermore, AIDS plagues Zimbabwe at rates similar or higher to those in neighboring nations.
To enable communities to survive this collapse, Marianne Knuth demonstrates how to use environmentally and economically sustainable living practices so that each community can take care of itself and not be dependent on the failing system to cover its basic food, health, and educational needs. In doing so she is turning the country’s crisis into an opportunity to build capacities that will strengthen Zimbabwean society in the long run.
The eco-village and learning center she has built, which is a living model of sustainability, attracts participants from across Southern Africa who join for between two weeks and three months. Small groups set intentions for the program and decide how they will live together, a framework that emphasizes training in leadership, cooperation, and basic knowledge of project management.
Marianne and her team are combining modern business and development theory and practice with ecological awareness, innovative deep dialogue techniques, and an exploration of indigenous African culture and wisdom into a unique and empowering curriculum for self-reliance. Participants learn concrete skills as well as deeper human capacities, hear stories of successful, inspiring communities elsewhere in Zimbabwe and around the world, and return to their communities to pursue solutions there.

Zimbabwe, a country of 12 million people, faces significant challenges on many fronts. People in rural areas cannot keep up with the rising costs of living. Children are being pulled out of schools because the fees are too high. Many of the women with whom Kufunda works are widowed and looking after orphaned grandchildren (of deceased daughters). Zimbabweans feel hopeless because they have come to rely on external sources of income, such as institutions and relatives who send money from the cities.

Rural people perceive their small farms and villages as poor and backward and themselves as without opportunity. They do not see the local assets hidden in their communities.

The fact is that Zimbabwe’s cash-based economy has failed, and until the government and the country undergo resuscitation, the people need to find alternatives to monetary exchange.

In the countryside near Harare, Marianne has founded a model village and learning center called Kufunda. A Zimbabwean team lives and works together in ecologically-sound buildings, eats vegetables grown on-site, and makes decisions on a participatory, consensus basis. Kufunda generates part of its own income and exists as a living model of one “way forward” for rural Zimbabwe.

Participants from nearby villages come to stay at Kufunda where they learn to both re-perceive their social and economic situations as well as to use local natural resources to become self-sufficient. They are simultaneously teachers and learners, cocreating ways to take on leadership roles and redesign their home communities.

The residential programs are oriented toward both learning and planning. Kufunda started out by hosting youth leadership and self-reliance programs (three months each) and community organizers’ programs (two weeks each). When Kufunda participants, especially young people, reported that it was difficult for an individual to come home alone full of new ideas for how to do things differently, Kufunda, in 2004, moved into “community development programs” as its new core program. In this program participants from one community at a time come to Kufunda for three two-week stays over the course of three months. This process of an ongoing relationship with specific communities, combining a residential course model with a community intervention model is a unique approach. The ongoing contact with Kufunda balances cultivation and interrelationship with the focus on self-reliance. One example of the impact of the community development program included the introduction of new community currencies.

The programs are purposefully residential to give the participants the Kufunda experience, removing them for a short time from their own contexts where they might have been too quick to negate possibilities. At Kufunda they understand what is possible through their own experiences. Then they develop a vision for where they wish to go while acquiring the practical skills to make it happen.

Marianne’s work is based on the understanding that something is dramatically incomplete in the approaches used for development over the last 50 years. Kufunda is developing self-reliance skills and attitudes in a population and demographic that is otherwise being forced into unhealthy institutional dependencies. For example, encountering people who have been taught a mindset of relying on official institutions for seed and fertilizer, Marianne helps them to research the knowledge that exists among the elders within their community about how land was cultivated before these products started coming from the outside, and helps them plan for and implement their own community development strategy.

Kufunda is thus breaking a cycle by actually demonstrating, cultivating, and encouraging rural self-reliance. It’s doing so in a striking way in that the people who run Kufunda, other than Marianne, would most likely have been forced into this cycle themselves. Instead now they are teachers and innovators. Kufunda is successfully run by the “beneficiaries” themselves.

Underlying the Kufunda experience is a focus on shifting perspective and developing intent. Participants learn stories of successful, inspiring communities elsewhere in Zimbabwe and around the world. They set their intentions for the workshop and decide how they will live together.

Having clarified their vision, the overarching focus of Kufunda turns to self-reliance. Kufunda functions as a self-reliance tool kit: Kufunda residents teach new practical skills, and program participants develop and apply skills needed for creating self-reliance in their villages. Currently, training areas are permaculture, ecological sanitation, growing and processing herbs and indigenous trees for medicinal purposes, nutrition and nutrition gardens, beekeeping, and mushroom growing.

To further self-reliance, Kufunda develops leadership and management capacities, emphasizing training in leadership, cooperation, and basic knowledge of project management. Kufunda uses Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science as one of the primary inspirations for teaching cooperative management skills.

People return to their villages after Kufunda training and start up microenterprises such as honey production, small-scale chicken farming, organic farming or gardening, and dressmaking. Although they might have had these skills before they did their Kufunda residency, most participants lacked confidence and the know-how to take on project management. Part of the practical training at Kufunda is time spent developing their initiatives as a way to learn project management.

Another important aspect for Kufunda’s success is that Marianne works with the counselor and village headmen so that the projects following Kufunda residencies are supported by local power structures, which is crucial during these days of political turmoil.

One thing that sets Kufunda apart from other learning villages is its adoption of the Appreciative Enquiry method, in which participants notice and build upon the positive elements already present in the situation at hand. This focus on “what we have now” starts all projects off on a solid foundation.

Another differentiator is the completely nonhierarchical structure of the learning village. Each day starts off with a circle meeting in which all members, no matter how many months or hours they have spent at Kufunda, have both the right and the responsibility to speak up and contribute to that day’s plan.

Marianne has already been invited to replicate her process and her self-reliance model with communities in other countries of Southern Africa.

Marianne’s mother is Zimbabwean, and her father is Danish, so she grew up in both countries. From childhood Marianne noticed the many discrepancies between the global north and south, not only in terms of Europe’s material wealth but also Africa’s community wealth.

In 1999 Marianne and two others cofounded Pioneers of Change, a flourishing network of more than 1,500 people in their 20s and 30s dedicated to systemic change. The Pioneers network is based on five principles: be yourself, do what matters, start now, engage with others, and never stop asking questions. It is a self-organizing, non-hierarchical learning group which meets regularly at local and international gatherings. Developing Pioneers clearly influenced how Marianne structures Kufunda.

Prior to founding Pioneers of Change, Marianne earned her bachelor’s degree in commerce and did her master’s in international business and finance at The Business School of Copenhagen. There she joined the international student organization AIESEC and became its first female president from 1996 to 1997. Managing such a large global organization taught Marianne about working with people from many different backgrounds.

Thanks to her involvement in these organizations and others, such as the Berkana Institute, Marianne has met and studied under some of today’s great thinkers. She has developed personal relationships with the authors of books which influence change management, and she is applying these lessons in her eco-village and training center. She and Kufunda have also joined the Berkana Exchange, a global learning network which shares and exchanges learning with other local pioneers around the globe. Marianne and her work at Kufunda were one of six centres globally chosen for participation in a study on the emergence of new locally rooted leadership by Dr. Robert Stilger from The Berkana Institute. He found that the way Marianne and Kufunda work are indicative of a new global social movement which is locally rooted, works with existing assets, and enhances opportunities rather than concentrating on solving immediate problems.

In a time of political adversity for Zimbabwe, Marianne felt called to her family’s land where she had spent part of her youth. She decided to “make real” the leadership models she had learned about in more global circumstances to help her Zimbabwean neighbors. After having spent five years as a leader in global organizations, she began to see that change which endures happens at the local level where communities develop deep capacity to use their own local wisdom and combine it with expertise from other places.