Nedbank and Skeen Primary School address environmental issues
Posted by Bridget in Environment
Nedbank and Skeen Primary school in Alexandra have joined forces to educate and implement sustainable development programme for the learners and the community. This programme comes as an initiative to improve the knowledge and understanding our South African communities have about “green living”. This is an initiative that aims to reach audiences that do not have adequate information about environmental issues.
The Nedbank “Caring for our communities and Saving our World” initiative is a comprehensive consumer community education programme that packages many sustainability lessons learned by the bank and presents them to community members in a way that allows them to harness the power of sustainable thinking and action for their own benefit. This programme comes from a partnership with Nedbank, WWF-SA and the Wildlife & Environmental Society of Southern Africa. It involves lessons with the community members on a two day workshop that highlights the meaning of sustainability, and thereafter allows them to apply these principles on a new project. The second phase between the grade 7 and 8 learners imparts the message of sustainability via storytelling and role plays.
Skeen primary is one of the 23 schools in the country that the bank has worked with, bringing equipments and facilities such as Rainwater Harvesting Tanks, Vegetable Garden Tunnels, Solar cookers that make the process of sustainability far more feasible. Nina Wellsted, Retail Sustainability Manager of the Nedbank Group, says this project is a beginning of a partnership with communities that will see many rewards to come. “We hope to enrich and build solid relations with our communities and provide them with useful tools to better understand the concept of sustainability and what role we play on improving our environmental conditions, says Wellsted.
The school has 6 vegetable garden tunnels, with approximately 900 spinach seedlings in each tunnel (using the hydroponic method of growing plants where mineral nutrient solutions provide the plants with all the necessary minerals and nutrients required for growth). The spinach grown in these tunnels has since been harvested to supplement the feeding scheme at the school, providing fresh and nutritious vegetables to the learners, thus taking the pressure off the government programme. Supplementary produce is also distributed to the learners’ families or sold to the communities to generate income for the school. More recently the produce has been sent to neighboring orphanages, hospices and old age homes, without any charge. 20 indigenous trees were planted at the school, as well as indigenous gardens, which is serve as an educational tool. With the Solar cooker, they are able to cook anything without the use of electricity, as it is fully reliant on the sun.
Because this is a joint venture between Nedbank and the community, it’s a shared responsibility between teachers, learners, groundsmen and the community to maintain the gardens, water the plans, through a timetable that set out who is responsible and when. The principal of the school Mr. Phillemon Mashishi says the project has benefited the school and the community enormously. “This project has seen an active involvement of the community, to build and empower each other through knowledge and active participation. Many of the children can concentrate in the classroom and perform better because they know they will not go hungry” Says Mashishi.
