EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT – Vusi Tshabalala

The Kruger 2 Canyons Biosphere Region hosted the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) workshop on the 6^th of September 2019 in Hoedspruit at the Rhino Convention Centre. The workshop was attended by 27 different organisations that are working with communities, schools, tribal authorities and other stakeholders in the K2C landscape. The Workshop was facilitated by Vusi Tshabalala, a Project Manager for the DEFF funded Environmental Monitors (EM) programme that works in 74 communities, 31 partner organisations, through 170 EMs by doing environmental education with schools, community meetings, awareness campaigns, animal rehabilitation, data collection, river monitoring and much more. 

The purpose of the K2C ESD is to provide an informal but semi-structured platform for the coordination, alignment, co-learning in Environmental Education linking to the formal conservation and education sectors by using the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme principles. The desired outcomes of the day were to see active participation that would help collaboratively track impact of efforts in the landscape that would lead to Improved collective practice to jointly inform other sectors about common ESD practises where inter-institutional learning can take place for core conservation/education messaging.

This was achieved by mapping out where everyone was working and the desired change or action we wanted to see take place on the ground using some of the latest 4^th industrial software’s that allows interactive participation between presenter and audience called the menti-meter where all the inputs can be seen on the projected screen with live feed from cell phones or laptops. It was suggested that all the organisations conducting EE to come together and develop a common curriculum that everyone can use that will be aligned to the school’s curriculum and everyone was also encouraged to involve the Department of Education and their circuit offices. 

The forum reflected on target audience which is currently mostly pupils at schools. It was agreed to involve other audiences, such as grannies and unemployed young people found in our communities, as well. Amongst many other things the forum also focused on what are some of the things changing in the landscape and how we can stay relevant or address some of this alien invasive species such as the Indian/common myna bird, famine weed, shot hole borer beetle, dumping of nappies in rivers and sand mining. 

Out of all those issues a need for more information, training and available learning material was requested whilst some of the topics would be too big for kids or can’t expect school pupils to solve the problem. In conclusion it was agreed more frequent and follow up workshops are necessary. If you would like to join us on the next one or need more information you can drop us an email at esd@kruger2canyons.org.