by Tinashe Madava
As the millennium comes to a close, environmental activists have pointed out that it is time to take stock of their activities and those of governments. Many people have rightly touted
environmental education as the key to sustainable development.
In 1982, environmentalists and educationists founded the Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa (EEASA) concerned with changing attitude and behaviour towards the environment. In conjunction with many awareness groups in the region, EEASA has made tremendous gains in environmental education.
As a way of increasing environmental awareness in formal education, the South African
government introduced the Environmental Education Policy Initiative aimed at supporting
participation from classroom to national levels in educational reform.
Environment 2000, an awareness non-governmental organisation based in Zimbabwe, says that environmental education programmes in the country continue to show positive growth as “feed back from rural communities keeps pouring in”.
Pamela Rutumhu Gara, Public Relations Officer of E2000, said the organisation carries out
awareness campaigns through radio and television programmes in a bid to show communities that they would benefit from conservation. E2000 also publishes a magazine called Green line, and gives out handbooks on the environment to schools, colleges and companies as part of environmental awareness.
As part of the success of the regional environmental education awareness campaign, the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre’s India Musokotwane Environment Resource Centre for Southern Africa (SARDC–IMERCSA) has published several reports on the state of the environment in the region.
One of the organisation’s publications, the State of Environment in Southern Africa, is being used as reference material for the training of teachers in South Africa. The book has been developed into a work guide for teacher training by the College of Education, South Africa.
Awareness campaigns peaked during the io” Cites Conference of Parties in Harare two years ago with Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe lobbying to have the African elephant down listed to Appendix II to allow for trade. Since then, environmental awareness campaigns have taken the form of community based organisations (CBOs). Awareness through CBOs has been described as the right tonic for rural populations who are given the chance to benefit from managing natural resources around them.
The provision of legislation allowing communities to keep revenue collected from their utilisation of natural resources acts as an incentive for sustainable development. As the community-based organisations grow, so does environmental awareness.
In Zambia, the new Wildlife Act was finally passed last December. The Act empowers communities living within Game Management Areas (GMAs) to create Community Resource Boards (CRBs) for managing wildlife and other natural resources in communal areas. CRB’s are also empowered to retain revenue from such activities.
Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), formally initiated in 1989, represents an attempt to move away from the adversarial relationship between conservation and local socio-economic concerns.
Administrative Management Design (ADMADE), Zambia’s clone of CAMPFIRE formally introduced in 1988, is designed along similar lines and works to promote sustainable utilisation of natural resources at community level.
Rather than relying upon the imposition of restrictions on the rural population to achieve its
conservation goals, the community-based organisations recognise the right of rural communities to benefit from the use of local resources, including wildlife.
The approach explicitly recognises that in order to gain more widespread effectiveness, advocates of nature protection must energetically pursue local support integrating local human concerns.
Like ADMADE, CAMPFIRE represents an effort to integrate a multitude of desires for increased conservation with the harsh reality of a rapidly expanding human population, expanding marginal agriculture and increasing rural poverty. The success of these CBOs is testimony of the successful environmental awareness campaigns in southern Africa.
CAMPFIRE aims to provide rural communities with the administrative control and socio-economic incentive to pursue locally enforced conservation, thus allowing over extended state enforced conservation to be replaced by more effective and equitable system of “conservation from below”.
The ADMADE programme has been accredited with empowering the communities where it is being implemented in Zambia with economic power that would manifest itself in recognition of other developmental messages such as family planning.
“The link between conservation and family planning has been brought by the economic gains that these communities are enjoying from hunting safari revenue,” said writer and environmentalist, Emmanuel Koro of Africa Resources Trust in a Zimbabwean paper, The Herald recently on Zambia’s ADMADE project.
The Yonge Nawe Environmental Action Group in Swaziland has also made inroads in awareness programmes. Jerry Nxumalo recently said the organisation was spreading “environmental awareness throughout the country using active participation with hope of encouraging sustainable utilisation of resources” .
Governments, the private sector NGOs and individuals should therefore work closely to chart ways of strengthening environmental consciousness and also implementing policies that encourage environmentally sustainable resource utilisation.(SARDC)
