Education

Looking to the Future

Education – for both children and adults – is key to the future preservation of our environment. CLZ was granted a wonderful opportunity to create an educational programme 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

CLZ is undertaking an Environmental Education Programme (EEP) within the Chiawa, Chongwe, Rufunsa and Luangwa areas (the Zambezi Valley). CLZ was founded in 1994 to help support ZAWA with the extra resources they needed for anti-poaching. By 2004, a conservation education programme was designed to cover the area through which the project is active. We all felt that if we did not educate and involve the local community, the destructive cycle of poaching would never be broken.

This is not an easy task. Because of the extremely difficult economic situation in Zambia, most people struggle to create a livelihood. More than 70% of the population live below the Poverty Datum Line.

With less than 50% of the local population engaged in formal employment, some people have resorted to exploiting the most abundant and easiest natural resources around: fisheries, forests and wildlife.

Even though these resources are protected by law, their wide distribution has made them extremely vulnerable. Low morale and not enough people to do the job has made the law quite ineffective. Worse still, most people view these resources as “God-given” that have existed from the time of creation, and will continue to do so no matter what. 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 activities for the children. It also gives local underprivileged children 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

Teachers are another precious resource we have. They are role models in society and the main contact for children to learn about their world. The EEP discovered that teachers in surrounding schools were not running conservation clubs simply because they didn’t know how. The CLZ-EEP have created a training progamme for teachers so that more environmental clubs can be set up at local schools.

The Pupils

As educators, we must inspire a certain passion in our children at all times. Environmental Education should not only tell children what should be done, it should also teach children how to do it and motivate them to take action. We believe this is essential for changing the attitude of our pupils towards natural resources and their management. CLZ-EEP’s next challenge is to improve the availability of reading materials and pupil-book ration. If you’d like to help buy some pupils some books – donate here.

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

Many three-day training workshops have been conducted for school children, community members and teachers from the local area since the EEP started operating. The mobile education unit also visits all of the project catchment area every year. Children and teachers are able to learn about environmental issues from the CLZ educator and his audio-visual equipment. In 2011 116 pupils and 16 teachers from 19 different schools visited the Education Centre and 1,276 pupils from 43 different school participated in the Outreach program.

In order to make the programme sustainable, posters and magazines that address local problems are under development. It is hoped that training coupled with these materials will start to change attitudes and behaviours. One can never be complacent and that is why the mobile unit continually checks on these target groups, advising, strengthening and re-training them.