Kakani International Training Centre, Nepal

This week, I have been on my travels visiting Kakani International Training Centre in Nepal.
This is a small Scout Centre about 23km away from Kathmandu, the capital located high on a ridge at about 2000m altitude on the edge of Shivapuri National Park. They have just under 44 hectares of land running down each side of the ridge.

The main Dormitory building at Kakani, with the 8000m peak of Manaslu in the background

At Kakani, they have many fantastic - eco ideas to make themselves incredibly sustainable and eco friendly, so we will run a series of eco-blogs about Kakani so that more people can see some of the incredible work that they are doing here.

One of the main things that they do at Kakani is grow a lot of their own food and this first blog will look at their food production.

Tea is the main drink here and is consumed morning, noon and night. Ask any pinkie and they will tell you the importance of a good Tea Break.... At Kakani they have 20,000 tea plants within their grounds which currently produce 8kg of tea each year. That's a whole lot of tea, but only fills about half of their needs. As the tea plants grow and more plants are planted they hope to make all that they need.

Eco can be refreshing! Fresh tea bubbling away at Kakani on the solar oven

Aside from all of this tea, Kakani provides food for itself by keeping chickens, goats, having a greenhouse and nursery to grow vegetables and having over 20,000 fruit trees - which mainly go into Jam. Kakani produces a lot of the food that it needs and then buys the rest from the local community, reducing food miles and helping the local economy.

The Greenhouse at Kakani

As everyone who has tried our Secret Life of Bees activity knows, bees are under threat worldwide and are really important not only for making honey, but also for pollenating our crops. So it was really good to find the bee hives at Kakani and see the bees doing what bees do best - making honey. True to form the bees here are under threat and only 3 of the 8 hives were inhabited. The bees here are being bullied and chased away by the somewhat frightening Asian Giant Hornets which are after the honey. A sting from this bad boy of the insect world can kill a human and the bees have little or no defence against them.

Inside one of Kakani's bee hives

Look out for future eco blogs about Kakani Internaitonal Training Centre - or if you want to learn more visit their website www.kakani.org

Jonathan (UK)

Programme Director