Support projects

Coumba Dady KA is fighting for positive change in Senegal through the creation of polyvalent gardens with fellow women. The garden’s final goal is to ensure food diet diversification and increased financial autonomy thanks to the engagement of these women. It’s inspiring!

The polyvalent gardens are parallel projects to the great green wall project in order to combat desertification. These gardens were set up and are managed in consultation with the women living in the villages across the Great Green Wall. These determined women have formed various Economic Interest Groups. The aim of these gardens is to allow the cultivation of fruits and vegetables throughout the year, to provide food security to different villages across the Great Green Wall. 

These gardens should provide enough food for self-consumption as well as enabling villagers to diversify theIR diet. What’s more, they have the possibility to sell their surplus crops at weekly markets. This initiative thus enables the women to achieve a new social and financial autonomy, as well as to develop their expertise in agriculture. 

Kerstin Forsberg is determined in engaging coastal fishermen communities of Peru in protecting the giant manta ! To do so, she created the marine educator’s teacher network as well as participatory research or community-based manta ray ecotourism. Planeta Océano engages coastal communities in marine conservation through research, marine education and sustainable development initiatives. These initiatives include:

1. Participatory research and citizen science: Local volunteers (fishermen, children, youth, among others) actively investigate local ecosystems, fisheries, and marine species, thus supporting local management efforts. Projects have included assessing shark and ray fisheries, pioneering manta ray conservation in Peru, assessing Traditional Ecological Knowledge on critically endangered sawfish, and supporting Marine Protected Areas.

2. Marine education: Incorporating and institutionalizing marine education and Ocean Literacy. Projects have included setting up Peru’s “Marine Educators Teacher Network” with over 50 schools, leading incubators for youth-lead environmental initiatives, game-based education and their Connecting Schools program, which aims to bring together students across borders through online technology and community engagement.

3. Sustainable development: Fostering environmental entrepreneurship and market-based approaches that contribute to marine conservation and socio-economic development. For example, pioneering community-based manta ray ecotourism in Peru as an alternate livelihood for low-income fishermen and local artisans.

Ultimately, these multidisciplinary and participatory efforts serve as a platform to connect multiple sectors in marine conservation, thus bringing together government, academia, youth, children, local fishermen, and many others.

The Sustainable Cupuaçu in the Amazon project, the result of a partnership established between the Klorane Botanical Foundation (KBF), L’Institut de Recherche Pierre Fabre (IRPF) and Beraca Institute for the Valorization of Sociobiodiversity (IB), was born with the intention of providing farmers and quilombola extractivists a new economic opportunity through the production of cupuaçu (Theobroma grandiflorum), a native species to the Amazon, through the Agroforestry System (SAF).

The project was conceived from KBF’s three missions: to protect; to explore; to educate. These missions were the guiding elements for the construction of the project’s objective and action areas, which have the following propositions:
PROTECT – Main element of the project that aims to protect the Amazon biome from the restoration of degraded areas through the implementation of agroforestry systems (SAF) in Bela Aurora Community. The project foresaw the planting of 3,000 feet of cupuaçu (in addition to other Integrated species) in the expectation of a production of around 6 tons of seeds in 3-4 years. The strategy adopted to achieve this objective is to transfer technology between family farmers in the community of Bela Aurora and the community of Santa Luzia, in Tomé Açu, which has a history of production in SAFs.
EXPLORE – The pillar aims to systematize and disseminate knowledge from the project’s learning and results, through scientific publications, congresses, etc.
EDUCATE – Consists on conducting workshops with children and young people from the Bela Aurora community, seeking to reinforce the element of environmental education in SAF cultures. This formal moment aims to help develop a more theoretical and critical perception of reality, focusing on the role of human beings in nature, the dynamics of trees in the forest and the importance of preserving biodiversity to maintain the balance of the biome. Within the initiatives aimed at implementing the SAFs, Six training workshops were planned, which involve activities to raise awareness of the importance of restoring degraded areas, preserving the environment and agro-ecological production with family farmers in Bela Aurora.

Tristan Lecomte understands the need to develop agroforestry and nature-based solution projects. To do so, he created the PUR project which incubates and build sustainable and environmentally friendly projects. Jubilación Segura, through which he gathers small-scale, fair-trade farming families who plant trees on degraded and unused lands in Peru, following forestry models, is one of this incredible project.  

Jubilación Segura is a project where the cooperative gathers small-scale, fair-trade, organic cocoa and coffee farming families who plant trees on degraded and unused lands in Peru, following forestry models, as well as on cultivated plots where they develop agroforestry practices.
The project also develops tree planting in the Amazonas Region which has faced high deforestation due to the extension of cattle ranching.

The objectives of the project are to:
– Protect ecosystems by developing agroforestry to ensure long-term sustainability of cocoa and coffee plantations.
– Fight deforestation and its consequences, such as soil erosion, decrease of water availability, natural disasters, landscape degradation, and biodiversity loss.
– Enhance farmers’ livelihoods by providing alternative sources of income.

By believing in the power of sustainable education, Diana Mc Caulay has reached more than 400,00 students all over Jamaica thanks to her schools’ environment programme ! Together with teachers, they empower youth through in schools sustainable development awareness.

SEP is the longest-running program of its kind in Jamaica, having been delivered in over 350 Jamaican schools, with an estimated reach of over 400,000 students and 700 teachers for over two decades. It is the Jamaica Environment Trust’s (JET’s) flagship environmental education initiative, and at its height, was Jamaica’s largest environmental education program.
SEP addresses the generally low levels of environmental awareness among Jamaican teachers and students and provides on the ground examples of good environmental stewardship. Participating schools use a whole school approach to carry out campus-based activities in four main areas: managing garbage, greening of school grounds, strengthening or establishing an environmental club and environmental research. The program also encourages the development, monitoring and ongoing evaluation of environmental action plans by JET, and introduces environmental issues via workshops for teachers and students. SEP encourages schools to place focus on specific environmental thematic areas for campus-based activities and promotes project-based learning. SEP also promotes environmental outreach to the wider school and local community and celebrates schools’ achievements via an annual awards ceremony.

In a quest to raise people’s awareness regarding Egypt’s natural heritage and specifically the Wadi Degla Protected Area, a group of citizens decided to use Virtual Reality to bring people closer to nature: when technology meets sustainable development! 

As part of Nature Conservation Egypt’s environmental education program, Wadi Degla Virtual Museum is a pioneering educational experience that provides environmental, historical, and geological awareness about Cairo’s gateway to the Eastern desert in a mobile and dynamic way. This project uses Virtual Reality (VR) technology to bring the public closer to nature and educate them about one of Egypt’s fascinating protected areas in the form of three 360-degree videos that cover the following topics:
1. The Geological History of Wadi Degla
2. The Biodiversity and Ecosystems of Wadi Degla
3. The Nature-friendly activities in Wadi Degla

They offer three main educational experiences:

Experience 1: An intimate closed lecture with select participants (max.16)
What it looks like: It is a 2-hour lecture that incorporates VR videos for all participants. At the end, all participants get printed educational material.

Experience 2: An open lecture followed by a closed VR experience session
What it looks like: It starts with an hour educational lecture that is open to anyone interested in learning about the Wadi Degla protectorate. Upon entrance, every attendant gets a raffle ticket. At the end of the lecture, 16 raffle tickets are randomly selected. Those whose numbers are chosen get to experience the WDVM videos with the team. All participants get printed educational material.

Experience 3: A public booth
What it looks like: Anyone interested can experience the VR and get educational material about the protected area.

Experience 4: A customized educational experience based on your context and preference.

Compensation
To ensure the sustainability of this project, they often charge for this service the institution and communities that do not suffer from poverty. Compensation is based on a sliding scale depending on the recipient’s ability to pay. A small percentage of the fees goes towards maintaining the project’s equipment while the majority goes towards sponsoring a free event at another institution that cannot pay.

Witnessing the problems of water scarcity in poor urban areas, Grégoire Landel decided to take action. He created a device that brings water to one billion urban dwellers who do not have access to running water at home. 

To bring running water to every urban home, CityTaps has developed a solution that bridges the gap between water utilities and the urban poor: a prepayment service that comprises the world’s only smart and prepaid water meter, and a billing software. This solution helps utility companies reduce Non-Revenue Water and identify leaks to avoid water loss. It also helps utility companies reduce debts and improve their balance sheet so they can extend their network and serve more people with running water at home, mainly in poor urban areas. 

Running water in the home is substantially cheaper, more convenient and healthier than any alternative. Grégoire Landel’s innovative solution has the potential to dramatically and quantifiably improve the lives and well-being of a billion people who do not have access to water at home. It is their goal to work together to make access to running water in every urban home a reality.

Citizens across 60 villages of the Maharashtra region gathered to manage the conservation of indigenous crop and local bio-resources; preserving soils through communities’ engagement ! 

Realising the need to work around diverse bio-resources which naturally occur in different agro-climatic zones and the significance of the sustained availability of this diversity to the communities, the work around native, domesticated and diverse bio-resources such as wild relatives and local cultivars of diverse crops and forestry species and indigenous breeds of domesticated livestock has been identified as an important Programme component in BAIF.

The programmes approach was to appreciate the naturally occurring diversity, initiate efforts for community based, participatory, in situ conservation and revival of these bio-resources. The programme also aimed to document traditional knowledge, useful traits and community’s perceptions of these bio-resources and ex-situ conservation actions by blending science and technology tools for long term conservation and availability of preferred diversity. The Project focuses on the creation of: a community managed seed and agricultural produce marketing system, promotion of low cost organic farming practices for crop production, knowledge building and transfer for conservation, cultivation, consumption, value addition of produce from crop cultivars and wild edible plants in 60 tribal villages of the Gadchiroli, Nandurbar, Ahmednagar, Palghar, Pune districts of Maharashtra. It fulfils the following key objectives:

• Documentation of biodiversity, traditional wisdom, and conservation practices adopted by communities in different ecosystems and eco-zones in Maharashtra,
• Validation and upholding of successful conservation practices by observations, experimentation, data collection and analysis
• Propagation of these successful practices by communication and intervention at the academic, policy and societal level, from the regional to the international scale.
• To sustain rich heritage of biodiversity resources on a long term basis to be able to address the issue of climate change related vulnerability and food and nutrition insecurity.