The Greening Schools for Sustainable Community Development Project is working with four schools to produce resilience plans based on ecovillage design best practices.
Representatives of the parents, teachers, students, and community leaders of the Kapete School community attending a participatory planning workshop at their school in August 2015.
The Greening Schools for Sustainable Community Development in Zambia project builds on a feasibility study completed in 2015 that combines Integrated Land Use Design (ILUD) with the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) approach. Four schools are participating in the project to produce Resilience Plans and become demonstration sites to inspire their surrounding communities towards sustainable development.
This two-year project is funded by the Scottish Government and will begin in the second quarter of 2016. It will be implemented in four schools, one of which is the Kapete Primary School in Chongwe District, which was the centre of the feasibility study.
The feasibility study examined the tools for inclusive and participatory planning and design for school communities. It was developed by the Regional Schools and Colleges Permaculture (ReSCOPE) Programme and the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).
Representatives of the Kapete School community included the children, teachers, parents, and community leaders who used the ILUD process with elements of the Ecovillage Design Education and the Adaptive Governance Cycle.
The participatory planning workshop produced by the Kapete School Resilience Plan included:
- An updated school vision and mission statement
- Values statement
- Resource inventory
- Design of the desired future landscape
- Action plan
The results of the study were shared with the education authorities at district and national levels.
About the Author
Mugove Walter Nyika works with the Regional Schools and Colleges Permaculture (ReSCOPE) Programme in eastern and southern Africa (see http://seedingschools.org) as the regional facilitator. The ReSCOPE Programme is active in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia and is seeking to establish new chapters in Tanzania and Rwanda.
He is also a member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) Africa Council (http://gen-africa.org). Mugove has been working with school communities using this approach since 1996, having been a high school geography teacher for 14 years before then.
