Five major stakeholders for our project are The World Hope International, Lehigh University, Sierra Leone farmers, our project leader and us. The World Hope international works with us to pay Jawara and help with our connections. They want to support our cause of helping the unemployed in Sierra Leone and give them jobs and build a market. Lehigh wants its students to gain experiences and help others so they fund and support these projects to the school looks better and for their students to build their resumes. Sierra Leone farmers are relying on our Mushroom Production Systems to work if they purchase them and to accordingly receive help and guidance in beginning their new business. Our project leader, Khanjan, is inputting his time and effort to help build this market and try to solve world problems. Finally, we are putting in our time to try and meet these people’s expectations with this project and build a solid foundation for groups to come and continue to work on this. All of these stake holders have put in time, money, and expectations into this project which we must try our best to meet. Their motivations are collectively similar in being they want to see this project succeed. Our goal is to reliably grow mushrooms in Sierra Leone with materials easily found there and to build/sell mushroom production systems for new farmers as well as teach them the process to where they can be successful and sustainable. We are to not disappoint these stakeholders so we will validate our project and enhance our credibility.

Three ways we will validate our project are through wide ranges of testing, and repetitive trials as well as data from how the project does in Sierra Leone. And we will enhance our credibility by detailing reports of what we do to prove that through our testing, we found a recipe and production system that reliably works with the materials we designated as easily found in Sierra Leone. We plan to communicate with experts from universities as well as mushroom farmers from around the world to create the best recipe for the substrate as well as refine the entire process with making clear steps with specified materials to do so. We also want to work with Jawara to make sure that materials we are choosing actually are easily come by in Sierra Leone and that we are not just making assumptions. By going through a local we can more strongly validate the reliability of our resources. Testing different mushroom varieties will also help us to find the best mushroom to focus on. By testing many possible variables, we will decrease the questioning of “what if you used this instead?” or “would’t this be better?” because we should have already tried that if someone suggested it or have a reason for why we did not try that. We need to show how we already tried everything we could/should to better validate that our process is the best and most successful for our purpose. We will try our best also to recreate growing conditions here like they would be in Sierra Leone so when we go over there, the recreation will be more successful and difficulties can be accounted for. We do not have the leisure of keeping things as sanitary as possible there like we do here and testing may help us see how to address that. We also are going to be dealing with hot, not as controlled growing conditions so instead of looking for a perfect growing temperature and humidity, we should attempt to get the best results in the most extreme ranges so that the farmers can more reliably use our product with success. We need to be careful about what we say at presentations so we have accurate information delivered. That will aid in our credibility as well as mentioning our confirmations from the outside sources we are in contact with. If we make a mistake talking we cannot continue to roll with it for the sake of making our presentation look better without stumbles. In the end, clarifying mistakes and saying “I don’t know” instead of making material up will better our credibility. We should approach this project with the mindset of we are trying to make the world a better place through this research instead of focusing on the grade. That will put more passion and effort into success with the project rather than success that is just enough for the grade books.