What can young people do when they see pollution affecting the river in their community? Quite a lot – especially when they have the opportunity to learn, investigate and take action together.
Through the City of Cape Town’s grant funding, EMG has been working in Mfuleni to support communities to become active stewards of the Kuils River Catchment. The project brings together young people and water activists to learn about the challenges facing their waterways and find practical ways to respond.
The project involved a series of activities designed to build knowledge, encourage learning and create a foundation for constructive engagement with the City.
The first step was an Education and Awareness Workshop, where learners explored water, pollution, the challenges facing their local environment and what indigenous and alien invasive species you can find along the river. 121 learners and four teachers from four Mfuleni high schools – Bardale High, Fairdale 1, Fairdale 2 and Mfuleni Tech participate.
The following day learners participated in a clean-up of the Kuils River – But this wasn’t just a clean-up.
As part of the day, the learners carried out a mini Participatory Action Research (PAR) project, documenting and categorising the different types of rubbish they found along the river. Instead of simply removing waste, they were collecting information that could help answer an important question: what is actually polluting our river?
Learners collated the information which was processed by EMG and analysed by the learners. This gave them an opportunity to turn their experience into evidence – and their evidence into a voice.
The findings were then taken into a meeting with the City of Cape Town at Rondevlei Nature Reserve, where the report helped inform discussions about pollution and the Kuils River Catchment.
For EMG, this is what environmental education can look like: not simply teaching young people about environmental problems, but supporting them to investigate the issues around them, generate knowledge and use that knowledge to engage with the people responsible for making decisions.
The river clean-up was only one day. But the process – learn, investigate, act and engage – is about building the confidence and agency of young people to play an active role in the future of their environment.