SADC
Regional Environmental Education Programme

Supporting a Network of NGO's to Strengthen Environmental Education Processes

This is a sub-project of the SADC REEP aiming to support a network of NGOs with an environmental education function, sharing skills, experiences and materials in order to strengthen environmental education processes in the SADC region. The aspiration is that the NGO partners specify their own needs in relation to the ‘NGO support’ funds, and in that way, the sub-project is demand?driven and negotiated. The opportunities for networking and sharing will be enhanced through this sub-project.

It is hoped that the strengthening of the regional coordinating events, such as the EEASA conference and council meetings, and the strengthening of regional publications, will provide opportunities for NGOs to contribute to and benefit from focussed and productive regional events and information sharing. It is therefore anticipated that the separate outputs result in interwoven outcomes and synergy with other sub?projects.

To date many environmental organisations have benefit from the NGO support, both financially and technically. Some examples include the Environmental Justice Networking Forum in South Africa and its members and the Lutheran Development Services in Swaziland. The Programme has also supported training courses and the two of the international conferences of the Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa (EEASA) which took place in Gaborone (Botswana 2002) and in Windhoek (Namibia 2003).

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Coordination Amongst Bilateral Projects

The aim is to establish an active network of environmental education projects sharing skills, experience and materials in order to strengthen environmental education processes in the SADC region. The aspiration is that the SADC Programme will provide opportunities to other bilateral environmental education projects to share ideas, materials and experience within SADC, and to enable sharing on a wider scale with other initiatives in the region.

This component works towards enhancing the cooperation between other existing environmental education initiatives in the SADC Region namely the National Environmental Education Project for the General Education and Training Band (NEEP-GET) in South Africa, the Lesotho Environmental Education Support Project (LEESP) in Lesotho, and the Supporting Environmental Education in Namibia (SEEN) project in Namibia.

The three national projects came together to work jointly on the Ubuntu Exhibition fair at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, and to organise workshops for sharing of skills and experiences more widely. In March 2003, a Regional Policy Workshop was organised to examine policy processes at SADC, national and local levels, and the emphasis was on support for policy processes through capacity development and learning support materials production. A similar cooperation workshop was organised in August 2003 around the issues of sharing experiences at national level for Sharing Experiences of National and Regional Processes to Enable Environmental Learning in Formal Education. A third workshop to enable sharing around the role of Indigenous Knowledge processes in environmental education took place in October 2003 in Pretoria.

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