La Caravana Escuela

Forging | Building | Teaching

La Caravana Escuela

We are a Blacksmithing school/factory with an itinerant and visionary educational model. Since 2019 we have been working continuously in the Páramos de Mérida, teaching farmers the art of forging agricultural tools and installing forging workshops in rural communities and technical schools. To date, men and women from the countryside have manufactured thousands of tools autonomously, working with their hands and without the need for electric light, recycling tons of automotive steel in their own villages. They are modeling a productive movement capable of mass-forging of quality tools for sale in hardware stores nationwide. It has fostered creativity, productivity and the expansion of knowledge in mountain farming communities, generating an immediate economic and social impact and diversifying the rural economy in a genuine and effective way. With a permanent presence in ten rural communities, over the past six years La Caravana Escuela (LCE) has taught more than 600 farmers (24.5% of whom are women, girls and youth) how to forge more than 20,000 tools for agricultural work and set up week-long camps to carry out the Forging Brigades that provide direct training to local farmers. At the end of the brigade in each community visited by LCE a Rural Forging Workshop (RFW) is installed. The RFWs are equipped with forges, anvils, tools, occupational safety equipment and mineral coal, so that, through continuous practice, the people develop skills, abilities and the necessary experience to forge quality pieces with marketable finishes.

This is made possible by a practical, comprehensive and ever-developing approach, fueled by the continuous need to forge new and better tools, and recycling scrap metal as a source of raw material to transform into useful, quality implements with commercial value. After six years, more than 27 tons of iron and steel have been reused.

Thus, in addition to teaching skills of immediate utility, LCE also provides a pathway to greater self-sufficiency, manufacturing necessary and indispensable tools for agricultural life, which would otherwise be unavailable or unaffordable. This enables communities to create income-producing opportunities for people facing significant challenges, empowering them with extremely valuable knowledge, tools, and resources in remote rural places.

The Learning Template

LCE has been establishing marketing channels with allied hardware stores in order to meet the growing demand for tool production, and thus generate direct income for our blacksmith farmers. Of course, having to deal with an established commercial market places new demands on our Rural Forging Workshops in terms of production, standardization and quality. To this end, LCE has redesigned its teaching processes and methods based on the creation of the Learning Templates. These Templates are, in principle, a system composed of a series of molds and dies that, when used step by step, allow a specific and standardized tool to be forged, optimizing the quality of the product.

ATM (Self-Powered Barter Mechanism)

Based on the Learning Template, in a social business model, the LCE Rural Workshops will be transformed into micro-tool factories, in a commercial scheme that allows the participating blacksmiths to collect labor payment at the end of the working day. LCE provides the raw material, enough coal, and the money needed for the blacksmiths to manufacture and deliver the finished tools hot stamped with the name of their village. These tools are then collected in the Base Workshop for review, final finishing and delivery. In this way, LCE certifies the products and sells them in hardware stores with a designation of origin that is hot-stamped in each rural community.

Revenue from sales is distributed as follows: Labor: 40%, Raw material and coal: 20%, Distribution Costs and Percentage of Sale: 20%, LCE Operating and Administration Expenses: 20%.

Environmental Responsibility

In order to offset the CO2 footprint with the use of mineral charcoal, since 2022 we have begun to plant native trees in each community we visit, helping to repopulate endemic forests in deforested areas. In this way, we recapture the CO2 released by each ton of coal used in the forge. Our goal is to plant twice as many trees as necessary, which makes La Caravana Escuela a carbon-neutral plus organization, imprinting a level of awareness, circularity and environmental responsibility to our educational-productive model. Under today's sun, we have planted more than 870 endemic trees in various rural villages in the state of Mérida.