Planting Promise was founded in 2008 when Rocco Falconer travelled to Sierra Leone. He met with Eddie Boston-Mammah, a local philanthropist whose wartime experiences had convinced him of the need to engage with his country’s development. Eddie tells his story here.
Together, Rocco and Eddie decided to start a small school. They found a half-completed shell of a building in central Freetown, got a piece of tarpaulin to form a makeshift roof, got tables, chairs, blackboards, teachers: the most basic elements to form a school.
Rocco remembers the night before registration was due to open very clearly: “I remember going to bed, worried that 50 children wouldn’t turn up. Because I thought if 50 didn’t, then the effort we’d gone through to recruit the teachers, all trained and qualified, to get the site ready, wouldn’t quite have been worth it. But when we went down to the site the next day, there was a long line of children, snaking around the corner. I didn’t even connect the children with what we were trying to do!
But they were all there for registration. Over the next 3 days we registered over 450 children, which was so inspiring but also daunting: we had nowehere to put all these children!
But nothing could have sent a clearer message about the need for education for children with no other chance of going to school. So we were adamant that our school wouldn’t rest as a drop in the ocean: we would create a way to offer permanent, quality education for children with no other chance of going to school.”
The challenge, of course was paying for it. We didn’t want to create a traditional charity, where money is raised by those in rich countries to fund service provision in poor countries. It was so uninspiring, and actually we don’t think you help people by making them dependent on you.
And Sierra Leone is so rich in economic potential. We thought: why can’t you unite this opportunity with this need? So that is what we set out to do.
Eddie and Rocco hired a car, and drove for hours into rural, remote farming villages. They said: farm for us.
We’ll provide the tools, wages, seeds and bags. We’ll organise getting the equipment in, and getting the crops out. We’ll give you 22% of the profits. The rest, we’ll use to fund our schools. And we’ll try to bring education and genuine economic opportunity into the villages in return. People were delighted: we brought wealth, employment, and aspiration to villages where very little was happening.
The point was to run businesses, to generate revenue, to fund schools. We laid our first cassava farms in November 2008, and our first rice farms in May 2009. Simple.
In July 2009 we started 3 new farms, bringing our total to 6 farming villages.
In January 2010, we opened 3 new schools in our farming villages, to deliver on our commitment to the villages in which we farm.
In July 2010 Rocco was awarded a Vodafone World of Difference award, allowing him to work full time for Planting Promise.
In August 2010, work started in earnest on our Secondary School, which will be the first ever Planting Promise Secondary School. To date, we have completed the first floor, and are fundraising to try and complete the exciting building. We still need £25, 000.
In October 2010 we opened our factory, and started to produce our unique ‘Welbodi Gari’, which is selling extremely well and will be showcased at the National Exhibition in Sierra Leone in April 2011.
As we look to the future, we hope to consolidate our schools and farms, to ensure that our values of:
- Pride
- Reliability
- Professionalism
- Progress for the Nation
- Absolute Quality of what we do
continue to underpin the huge strides we are making in offering genuine human and economic development in Sierra Leone.
