Alex Petroff

Why we chose Alex as a Fellow

Alex Petroff is a farm boy from Maine who finds it more interesting to farm in the most dangerous part of the Congo. Alex's boyhood in rural Maine and liberal arts education at Hampshire College, left him determined to do something useful for African farmers. Finding Uganda too comfortable, he wound up in Eastern Congo, where he runs a teaching farm that has thrived amidst continual warfare.

Africa's two models of farming - the plantation and the one acre farm - will never get rural people out of poverty. In 2005, Alex started Working Villages International to build a new model of farming that would get people out of poverty. His idea was to reconfigure the family farm as a ten acre plot that would allow high-productivity techniques and draft power provided by oxen. Congo provided a unique opportunity to develop the idea: as people crept back into fertile war-torn areas, the authorities were delighted to get land back into production. Working Villages now runs a vocational school for farmers: employees learn agricultural techniques and are established with their own 10 acre farm.