From Mud to Livelihoods: A Different Vision for Rural Regeneration

The story of African Way’s Ecolise Demonstrator Project in Portugal is an example of how rural community cohesion can be enhanced through mud building, youth-led action research and skills development for a just transition, using clay building and climate-aligned livelihoods. We started with a simple question: what would it mean if European funding for a just transition could do more than simply finance projects? What if the African Peace Village’s migrant-led clay building and livelihood initiatives could also help communities in Europe recover their capacity to shape their own futures ecologically?

The African Peace Village originated from the premise that shelter and food for displaced people pave the way to peace, and as a demonstration of what direct finance for migrant-led regeneration could look like in practical terms.

It is a community-led initiative rooted in the belief that peace is not simply the absence of conflict. Its ethical mission is to preserve dignity and belonging through livelihoods, shelter and a healthy relationship with the land. Since its registration in 2021, it has provided an opportunity for young people and women in southern Portugal to imagine a future where they can thrive together with immigrants.

The initiative emerged from collaboration between Bafut Ecovillage in Cameroon and the African Way community in Portugal, experimenting with how rural communities can be enriched through regenerative knowledge, culture and natural resources, without becoming entirely dependent on systems of public finance and international decision-making bodies.

It is this lived experience that African Way presented to ECOLISE as a practical demonstrator action: clay building, ecological restoration, youth skills development, community research, sustainable livelihoods and intercultural learning.

At its heart is something remarkably simple: mud can become a pathway to peace.

Building from local knowledge

We started by co-creating this concept with our host community in Burgau because we saw a gap between the enormous potential within the rural community and the financial support available to it through government policies.

We observed that, because of the limitations of top-down governance systems, young people are leaving rural areas because they do not see viable livelihoods available to them. We also noticed traditional knowledge and life skills disappearing from European villages, while communities become increasingly fragmented. In the housing sector, living spaces are becoming increasingly unaffordable and dependent on materials and management systems disconnected from local resources.

Clay, for example, is not merely a building material. It is a skill and a form of knowledge linking work, culture and climate adaptation, while offering young people an opportunity to develop livelihoods.

Today, a stone foundation and the ecological restoration of a farmhouse using mud are underway to provide accommodation for students and volunteers. These actions seek to weave these different elements together and demonstrate that rural regeneration can be community-led, practical and economically meaningful.

By engaging local people in mud building, we are responding to interconnected crises of displacement, rural depopulation, youth unemployment, loss of traditional knowledge, housing insecurity, environmental degradation and the growing impacts of climate change.

Our ecological building project is an attempt to transform this narrative. Instead of seeing communities only through their needs, we began by harnessing their knowledge, assets, creativity and capacity to contribute to the project design through a participatory process.

While looking for seed funding, we are adopting a patient approach by designing flexible, transparent, revenue-supporting activities that can attract partnerships between African Way and municipalities. These partnerships can provide access to technical knowledge for youth and women while recognising local knowledge as a form of expertise.

For African Way, this work is deeply personal because it started with a journey of displacement from Africa to Europe that does not mean leaving Africa behind. Instead, it creates an opportunity to connect experiences across bioregions and to ask what Europe and Africa can learn from one another.

African Way’s vision of mud-building partnerships has evolved from an idea into a living bridge between communities since we became an Ecolise Demonstrator.

Young people on the project are rediscovering the value of working with their hands. Traditional knowledge is meeting contemporary climate thinking. Refugees and migrants are being recognised not only as people needing support, but as carriers of knowledge, culture, skills and solutions.

These changes may appear small, but a wall built from clay, a young person learning a skill, or a community gathering around a shared project can restore something much bigger: confidence that another future is possible when we work together.

Accommodation for refugees, immigrants and volunteers is central to our mission because a home is much more than a structure. It is security, dignity, identity and belonging. Locally available natural materials such as clay, stone, sand and grass are providing pathways towards healthier, lower-impact and culturally appropriate buildings, while creating employment and transferring practical skills to the next generation.

We believe that, through partnerships, European policymakers have an opportunity to see that a transition to sustainable buildings is not only about technological innovation. It is also about rediscovering and valuing the knowledge already held in communities, while combining it with contemporary science, design and policy.

From mud, we can build homes.
From skills, we can build livelihoods.
From relationships, we can build peace.
And from communities working together, we can build a just transition.