Education

Looking to the Future

The importance of education to both children and adults has long been seen as the key to the future preservation of our environment and habitat and CLZ was granted a wonderful opportunity to pursue this aim with generous funding from DANIDA in the period from 2005 - 2007. In that time almost all the school children within the huge area covered by the operation have been reached and taught how important it is for all our futures to look after the scarce resources we have.

Education & Training Programme

Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ) is a local organization that is undertaking an Environmental Education Programme (EEP) within the Chiawa, Chongwe, Rufunsa and Luangwa areas (the Zambezi Valley). CLZ was first incepted in 1994 where it has supported a great deal of activities with ZAWA. By 2004, there was a felt need to design a conservation education programme that would cover all the area through which the project is active.

This task has not been easy. This is because, livelihood in Zambia is extremely difficult especially economically. More than 70% of the population live below the Poverty Datum Line. With less than 50% of the local population engaged in formal employment, life for the greater majority is tough. With this scenario, some have resorted to exploiting the most abundant and easiest natural resources around; these being Fisheries, Forests and Wildlife.

Even if these resources are adequately protected by law, their abundance and wide distribution has made them extremely vulnerable. Low morale and not enough people to do the job has made the law quite ineffective and worse still, the people view these resources as “God given resources” that will and have never finished from the time of creation! This attitude has led to these resources falling folly to the greed of man.

The strategy of the EEP is to sensitize the local people to take responsibility in managing their local resources. All the programme is designed to do is to stimulate enough interest in the community to see the long-term benefits of conservation.

The EEP uses training workshops to assist teachers to formulate conservation clubs and develop low-cost EE activities while at the same time accord the local underprivileged children and the local community the opportunity to see and learn about wildlife in its local environment. Because conservation is not a one-man show, networking with stake-holders is a crucial component of the EEP.

The Teachers

These are role models in society who spend a lot of their time developing our children when they are in schools. The EEP discovered that part of the reasons why teachers are not so keen to run conservation clubs is that they didn’t know what to do. The CLZ-EEP will attempt to re-dress this situation through training.

The Pupils

CLZ-EEP believes that as educators, we must try to arouse a certain passion in our children at all times through EE. EE should not only rotate around telling children what should be done, it should also rotate on teaching children about what needs to be done and training them on how to do it. This is a better way of changing the attitude of our pupils towards other natural resources and their management. CLZ-EEP intends to improve the availability of reading materials and pupil-book ration.

The Community

The CLZ-EEP intends to empower local people to take responsibility over their natural resources through programmes that promote community participation. Training and sensitisation is a critical part of this component.

THE PROGRAMME

To date, over 250 teachers, pupils and community members have visited the centre. A total of 10 three day training workshops have been conducted. 8 training workshops for pupils and 2 for community members and teachers through out the area have been held.

The Mobile Unit, a Land-cruiser mounted with TV and video has done a total of 12 round trips reaching a total of 6000 pupils in schools, 40 teachers and 840 community members throughout the region.

In order to make the programme sustainable, posters and magazines that address local problems are under development. It is hoped that once materials are made available coupled with training, attitude and behavioural change will occur. One can never be complacent about these numbers alone, that is why the mobile unit checks on these target groups, advising, strengthening and re-training them.
 

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Contact Conservation Lower Zambezi: CLZ@iwayafrica.com