Environmental Education Camps for Poverty-Stricken Youth

The goal of the programme is to offer participants an exciting experience, while at the same time teaching them practical environmental skills which they can use in their daily life. Moreover, participants are encouraged to initiate a small project, such as food gardening or recycling.

The SCENE programme includes a variety of activities, and the topics that are covered include the following:
- Conservation and respect for the environment
- Human interaction with the environment
- Team work and negotiation skills
- Food security
- Climate change
- Ccommunication skills
- Leadership and assertiveness
- Problem solving and decision making
- HIV/Aids awareness.

Representatives from schools were interviewed eight months after their pupils attended SCENE camps, and they indicated that the project’s objectives of increasing environmental awareness and promoting the initiation of small-scale projects were reached. The interviews showed that eighty percent of the youths who attended the camps thereafter implemented environmental projects or activities at school, such as recycling, food gardening, waste management and the collect-a-can project. One of the participating schools, Mailakgang Primary, afterwards entered a national competition and won a prize of R80,000 for taking care of the environment. The above indicates the success of the SCENE programme, and the effect it has had on individual participants and participating schools.