IPP 2010 Mozambique

Theme

The non-wastable waste

Location

Dondo Beira - Mozambique

Dates

09.08.2010 - 30.08.2010

Delegations

Portugal, France, Italy, Netherlands, USA, Brazil, Denmark

Note that the countries listed were invited in Round 1 and that this information may change in later Rounds.

Partner Organisation

Fundação Lusalite Vida

Description

After the 2008 IPP “Dondo: Mozambique Challenge” CISV will be working with Fundação Lusalite Vida again in 2010. This IPP will continue to focus on the needs of the community, and of the projects already being developed by the partner organization, giving the participants an amazing opportunity to contact with the foundation’s reality and embrace the challenges they are faced with. The challenges of this IPP will bring the participants a chance to live inside a community that is developing, sharing their hopes, working alongside with them, which will hopefully bring them a unique opportunity to understand one of Africa’s many cultures and make them more aware of the differences around the world in terms of sustainability and the breaking of the cycle of poverty.
 
Aims of Partner Institution:
Fundação Lusalite Vida (Lusalite Life Foundation) was created in 1998, looking to fulfil the social responsibility of the company that it is affiliated to, Lusalite, and to address the needs of the community of Dondo, by promoting a sustainable social-economic project that will empower the families of the workers of the company, as well as the poor families living around the company area. Dondo has a good potential for agriculture and other related areas, but there are scarce material resources, the population has a low level of education (little access to schools), having an average income per capita lower than 1 US dollar and there is little access to health facilities. The young adult generation has little qualification and work is limited.  The foundation’s main areas of intervention are: economic and social development; environment; basic sanitation and quality of life; health; education; culture and sports; construction and habitation; and police (together with the local government).
The foundation provides paid work to 50 people and also attempts to provide basic needs and offer educational opportunities to children, adolescents and adults, by working with the local community – directly with more than 400 individuals (66 families), and indirectly with more than 2000 individuals (370 families).
Thus far the foundation has been able to provide an after-school centre where the children are taught as well as participate in activities and it has also been able to feed them the only two meals they able to have per day. The foundation also focuses on creating awareness and responsibility about the sustainability of the environment, through reforestation and other projects. Presently, the foundation is developing with the community, a 3 year plan that focuses on reduction of poverty, and proposes to work mainly on education and environment, always having empowerment and sustainability as a basis as well as the direct involvement of locals in the process. As a result of the 2008 IPP, the foundation wants to commercially explore the forest as a venue for eco-tourism and as a place of interest for school trips, but has not yet begun. Training has been given to forest guides and four different circuits have been marked.
The foundation is funded mainly by the Lusalite company, but also by other institutions, and looks for partnerships in Mozambique and abroad, in order to develop the different areas of focus. There have also been partnerships with the local authorities and there are volunteers already working in some of these areas.
 
Educational part:
Mozambique is one of Africa’s countries with an extremely different culture from the ones we have lived in and contacted with, but also a very unique one. The participants will find opportunities to: expand their cross-cultural awareness; to develop their perspectives about cultural differences; to think about the importance of diversity and how enriching it is for the world as a whole; to deeply feel and value a different and strange culture; to prevent future cultural shock between participating countries; to respect, all religion and rituals, values and ways of life.
The educational aims of the project cover most of CISV’s educational circle, with a particular emphasis on development education and international solidarity due to Mozambique’s characteristics as a developing country.
Development education involves a sustainability process, which means that a natural working cycle must be created through informal education and by exploring work methods that maximize the use of limited resources. By working with the environment and the land, we can create and develop awareness about the importance of the relationship between man and environment for the future of our children as well as a caring attitude towards the environment as a whole. We will strive to draw attention to the idea that the provision of basic needs (such as food and health) and quality of life are intrinsically related to the impact of one’s behaviour on the environment.
The inherent characteristics of the project and its setting provide the opportunity for the participants to learn about the importance inter-dependence in group life and about their own limitations by being faced with significant communication and cultural differences while having to deal with problem-solving situations. We will have to ask ourselves questions such as how can we overcome our differences? How can we encourage solidarity behaviour towards others? How is awareness created and not imposed? How can the population benefit the most of our presence? Together we will explore and debate a variety of themes such as each delegation country’s approach to dealing with the environment and the demands of society, the role and types of education, and as a hot topic the importance of tourism and its role as a promoter of economic and social growth and development. These questions and themes will be on our minds throughout the IPP.
 
Practical part:
The Project will be divided into four work groups:
 
1.      Compost
Compost and recycling come together in perfect harmony and are a part of the same line of thought: to give back to nature everything it can still take in. The main objective of this project is to transmit a culture of recycling.
Taking this into consideration, the first step will be to learn how to differentiate/separate garbage and know what type of waste can and cannot be reused. We will find a strategy to transmit different cultural values as well as create educational material that illustrates these needs – this activity is inserted into the “communicate/advertise” working group. The second step will be the building of a container for the production of compost to be used in the plantations and nursery built in the previous IPP, spearing the local community the cost of buying industrial fertilizer in the market.
The success of this project depends on how we pass along the message that compost can be a great long term investment by the community of Dondo.
 
2.      ATL (after-school center)
Environmental education begins with the children and their involvement in dynamic, playful and educational projects that encourage them to naturally take care of themselves and the environment. Confronted with the IPP2008 experience, we observed that creativity is not stimulated with the children, so for that reason and because we value creativity and consider that it cannot be ignored only because we are dealing with a developing country, we propose a relationship between environmental education and creativity. We will start a “game and toy workshop” using waste materials such as cans, plastics, wood etc. simultaneously we will build a mini-compost associated with the main compost project.
In both projects that take place in the ATL (children’s center for after-school activities) we will work with CISV’s educational tools to facilitate informal education.
 
3.      Technical information
With the help of Agronomy Professors we will learn how to catalogue and nurse native plants. This will improve the quality of the nursery built in the IPP 2008. On the other hand we will also have access to information that will teach us how to make better machambas (vegetable agriculture) comparing to the existing ones: more lucrative and sustainable.
 
4.      Communicate/Advertise
Towards defending the continuity of the implemented projects by the IPP2008 and the ones proposed for the IPP2010, we consider it is important that there is information about each project and that it is physically on display with resistant material. The content has shall be comprehensible to the local community, so we will use visual communication, i.e. universal communication, and locate the information in places of interest. For example: board 1: “how to make compost”; board 2: “what is this nursery for and what species does it have”; etc.
These communication “structures” will serve two purposes that we consider vital to the sustainability of the projects: help the local community remember how the projects work and to what end and aid the Foundation LVida in its quest to promote of tourism at the Nhamainga forest.
 
Participant Profile
1
The participant should be ready to face difficult and complex local livelihoods. We will deal with people and families who are still facing a lot of problems in order to survive. The situation the children are in is also sometimes very difficult to deal with and will challenge all of us. Some activities will also be physically demanding and others psychologically hard for all of us, so each one of us should also be prepared to help each other in times of emotional distress.
2
Physical:
Energetic
Fit
Healthy
3
Educational:
Interested in sustainability issues
Interested in different ways of communication
4
Personal attitudes and skills:
Good at interacting with people in general
Cultural sensitivity
Willing to try and learn with new experiences
Respect safety rules
Educational Objectives
1
To give participants a chance for international solidarity and to understand the differences between the development and developing countries
2
To promote a balance between the environment and the community
3
To continue the work started in 2008, specially the bond Community – CISV.
 

Contact

Local: Joana Norton dos Reis, Project Coordinator: Anna Cohrs

Documents: