Skills Development for Community Youth
ECOaction has partnered with a local girls school, Nabisunsa Girls School, to motivate youth in the community to reduce, reuse and recycle! Reagan has described how their school grounds have been transformed into a colorful urban garden with greenhouses for growing crops. It is hoped that the skills that these pupils will gain through this experience will help the youth tackle unemployment.
Dr Grace Lubaale of Kyambogo University spoke to The Daily Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper praising Reagan’s community work, outlining that:
“Instead of many educators clinging to old and increasingly ineffective methods of teaching, it is better to use innovative teaching methods. This will help to produce a type of students that think outside the box, who can use what is available to bring about something new,”
“The amount of rubbish we create is constantly increasing because we have no proper disposal policy and if all our students are trained on how to manage this waste, they can extend the knowledge to the bigger communities,” says Reagan Kandole of ECOaction village, Banda.
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Exhibition: ‘Towards a Zero-Waste Environment’
‘Empowering Community Innovations from Banda’ took place Saturday 21st July from 10am-2pm in Banda community, Kampala. The exhibition, in partnership with the University of Oxford, showcased innovative ongoing projects that repurpose waste towards new ends, stunning eco-art installations, imaginative proposals for small-scale community waste management systems, and one-on-one community engagements.
Garbage is one of the most challenging environmental problems facing Kampala, contributing to flooding, generating outbreaks of communicable diseases, and harming the image of the city. The KCCA has made great strides to tackle this issue in collaboration with private waste collection companies. Nonetheless, garbage remains a problem for the city’s poorest residents. This exhibition recognized the creative solutions these communities have developed to deal with garbage, and to challenge viewers to imagine a clean and inclusive future for Kampala where these innovations are integrated into official municipal waste management systems.
The launch of the exhibition featured demonstrations of ECOaction’s dynamic community engagement, training, and livelihood projects that go BEYOND GARBAGE to create incomes and innovations from waste. Designed to take art out of museums and galleries and into communities where local creativity is on full display, the exhibition will take place in mobile pop-up gallery built from up-cycled materials by young members of the ECOaction team.
The exhibition was organized by ECOaction, a Kampala organization focusing on youth empowerment and environmental innovation in the most marginalized communities, in collaboration with an anthropologist from the University of Oxford who has conducted extensive research on municipal waste management in Kampala, and with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (USA).
