Community Tackles Waste Management in Rural Africa

Oct. 27, 2010 - PRLog -- “Project Clean-Up” was implemented in 2008 as a community initiative in an effort to address the enormous build up of historical refuse that had accumulated in the village due to no waste management services on the part of the municipality. Between 8 000 – 10 000 bags of historical refuse were collected and removed from the village by residents. A Friends sponsored dustbin programme has seen the installation of dustbins as collection sites go in and free bin bags are handed out to the community with the support of volunteers from VA32 (see http://www.volunteerafrica.co.za/ for more on Volunteer Africa). The group, together with local businesses and the rate payers and residents association successfully lobbied the municipality to put a refuse truck through the village on a weekly basis to collect residents’ waste. A group of five women continue to volunteer their services on a weekly basis to keep up the neat look of the village and encourage the Friends ethos of striving for Pride of Place and Space.
Beyond this, the Friends group is running a further 20 projects in their community which include feeding 80 000 hot meals a year through the daily feeding scheme at the school, developing a Community Sport Centre, running a surfing development school, partnering computer literacy development initiatives, mentoring emerging businesses, encouraging local economic development opportunities and overseeing a Healthy Living interactive lectures based initiative which draws on health specialists to visit the village and share information.

This week the Friends group won the regional prize of R15 000 in the JET Awards and are contending with one other community for the national prize of R75 000.

The strength of our successes are in the unity of our community.To find out more about the Frineds of Chintsa visit http://www.friendsofchintsa.org

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Volunteer Africa 32 Degrees South (VA32) is a volunteer organisation based in Chintsa, on the Wild Coast of South Africa. Since 2004 they have been working to help support and develop rural communities through education and conservation initiatives.