**4. Organization of the Songhai Center: complementarity and supplementarity**

The Songhai business model has articulated five components to deliver its mission. The model builds on a foundation of symbiosis and synergy in the ecosystem and articulates a framework based on complementarity and supplementarity. First and foremost, it is a cultural reorientation and training center where ecological literacy is foundational, and the emerging world view, concepts, and principles from modern science, combined with the implications for economic and social organizations, is inculcated into youth from the community. Second, the Center serves as a technology park, where new technologies and organizational structures

*Regional Development in Africa*

of poverty in a sustainable manner.

and structure that will enable us to consistently unleash the appropriate creative and organizational forces to produce the social values, goods and services that correspond to our needs and desires" [15]. The loss of this capacity breeds passive consumerism and the adoption of piecemeal solutions, other people's experiences, systems of production, as well as values as the cheaper, quicker substitute, instead of doing the hard work necessary to have indigenously and endogenously developed

Having correctly identified the multiple crises that face development in Africa, including food security, poverty, demographic transitions, youth unemployment, and environmental challenges, and recognizing that these are all connected and interdependent, the Songhai vision has been underscored by understanding the problem as systemic, requiring an integrated and holistic approach. The integration and holistic conceptualization was hypothesized to result in and enable synergy and sustainability. In the African rural context, where agriculture is the main and core human activity, this agroecological initiative and approach should reverse the logic

Undergirding the Songhai approach is the development of the human capacity for authentic, holistic, and thus sustainable development. The program for human capacity development must be well-designed and coherent, integrating authentic technologies as well as enabling environments, which together would be required to guarantee sustainable, broad-based, and inclusive growth and development on the African continent. The human resource development program is designed to grow and maintain a new human resource base with a fundamentally new culture and capacities that are aligned with the socioeconomic realities of today and tomorrow. The Songhai Center's human development program is aimed at developing socioeconomic leaders who can implement and operate sustainable rural growth programs throughout Africa [15, 16]. Leading sustainable rural development programs requires an awareness of the integrated nature of rural environments involving crosscutting and interrelated dynamics among a diverse resource base, engaging polyvalent personnel and interdependent structures and organizations. Thus, the business model that is employed is essentially a call for dynamics and orientations that go broader and deeper than previous attempts at development, which means a radical shift that combines environmental, scientific, technical, social, and economic orientations. This combination must be both latitudinal, across areas of emphasis, but also longitudinal, from production to consumption; the continuum begins with resource extraction or cultivation followed by processing and transformation into value-added products and services. Given the agricultural context, the approach has to be systemic and multifunctional, which will insure food and nutrition security and health, but also increase household income, all in a sustain-

Implemented in this framework, integrated agroecological rural development can become, as it were, a weapon of mass construction. Providing the relevant ecological literacy to the youth of a community can empower and capacitate them to develop and deploy appropriate technologies that are aligned with this new vision. The vision has to have a core, enabling institutional framework to foster skill development, as well as the generation and sharing of technologies that are relevant

In the Songhai model [17, 18], agriculture is holistically conceptualized to promote the biological processes in which investments can focus the development of environmental and biological capitals that facilitate agricultural systems to operate effectively and efficiently in a systemic and synergistic manner. At the fundamental (biomass and bioenergy) level, Songhai processes effectively manage the flows of energy and biomass within the whole system to create new and better

relevant solutions that are authentic, holistic, and sustainable.

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able manner.

to the rural communities the youth inhabit.

and patterns that are aligned with the new world view are elaborated, and these are developed and contextualized in collaboration with research institutions and universities. Third, the Center is an industrial park and production center, where the ideas, techniques, and organizational tools developed as part of the education and research in progress are turned into small enterprises and launched in an integrated and systemic manner [15, 16].

Fourth, it is also an incubation and training center for human resource development. Here new competencies are developed, while new visions are harnessed and new techniques and methods are developed and deployed within the technology parks. The target is the establishment of productive, effective, and efficient enterprises. The community, participating in the study, design, development, and production activities, always facilitated by mentor-practitioners, builds capacity and enhances technical, organizational, and managerial competencies, resulting in the creation of a functional entrepreneurial workforce able to add value. Since their inception, large numbers of youth have sought enrollment in the various Songhai Centers, a sign that youth are excited and attracted to new innovative agricultural initiatives that they see as bringing income and value into their and their family's lives. Fifth and finally, the Songhai Centers are also service centers, where graduates from the various training and capacity building programs are leveraged with critical services such as marketing, input procurement, hospitality services, networking, financial and loan services, as well as advisory and advocacy services and programs that create the synergies which enable the program's graduates to create synergies through initiative and cooperation.
