Investing in Youth
We seek to invest in younger generations by facilitating practical projects that promote youth engaging with their community and their local environment. While our development partners ASTCF help boost education in the region by providing volunteers and resources for local schools, we collectively aim to foster a number of sustainable activities that allow youth to feel empowered by having a positive impact on their community. These projects green, educate, offset carbon emissions and transform schools and other community centres into healthier and more sustainable environments.
How We Help...
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Tree 4 Life
The conservation and environmental project has been initiated under our integrated poverty alleviation and conservation program. Through its partnerships with local schools, ASTCF make regular visits to local schools in the Kahangi region as part of its conservation education and 'Tree 4 Life' programs. The project involves helping initiate conservation based activities in local schools in order to help students understand and appreciate the importance of preserving their local environment for the benefit of a sustainable local economy, eco-tourism and limiting carbon emissions.
A donation to Educaring Africa can help provide fruit trees and native plants for local students to plant at their schools and around the community. In the past we have provided local schools with seedlings for avocado, mango and jackfruit plants. This project not only helps to preserve the local environment but it also teaches students about the importance of sustainability.
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Youth Empowerment
Many people, especially in the rural areas of Uganda, live on severely degraded land. These land conditions directly affect their living standards. It is very difficult to grow food, collect firewood, or make a living off the land. Degraded land also contributes to global warming — when trees are gone, they can no longer remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We encourage youth engagement in the local area by facilitating programs that promote environmental conservation and management practices through training the students and communities in environment protection activities such as tree planting, flood control mechanism, fruit and vegetable growing and energy conservation technologies.
Another key ASTCF project is wildlife protection and conservation. In many African communities, conflicts will often arise between people and wildlife. In Uganda, conflicts often relate to animals such as chimps and elephants destroying people's land and farms. ASTCF has established a range of projects, which aim to not educate people of the importance of wildlife, but educate them on ways to co-exist with wildlife through the adoption of sustainable practices. Youth are encouraged to run activities such as constructing of bee hives, which not only provide honey for the community but prevent wildlife from destroying farmlands.
Educaring Africa has also recently funded its first stablised soil brick pressing machine that the youth empowerment group will operate. This sustainable technology will allow youth the create free bricks for various construction projects in the local community including latrines, houses and school buildings. With four people operating the machine, it is capable of producing 500 bricks per day. The best part is, it is environmentally sustainable as bricks are sun-dried and therefore no fire is required to produce them. For more information on this technology click below to find out more information.