Outreach Greening Programme

The last two years include training school teachers to use the garden as an educational resource tool in formal teaching as part of the outlined national curriculum. ‘Green Teams’ being learners, workers and teachers from the school’s eco-club are utilized to get involved in the cultivation of the gardens. Having a form of an eco-club at your school is a programme requirement. This further motivates schools that are not eligible to enter the programme to create environmental awareness projects at their facilities. After its full implementation, the programme establishes indigenous water-wise school and community gardens. This promotion of biodiversity helps develop not only local environmental awareness and action but also gardening skills to enable local economic empowerment. In the Western Cape, the areas on the Cape Flats like Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Delft, Grassy Park, Nyanga, Guguletu, Belhar, Eerste Rivier and Langa have benefited. SANBI is the driver of the programme offering the experiential training, funding and materials. The Western Cape Education Department offers support in the form of quality assurance of the training and providing access to the schools. There are an array of South African private, corporate, government and international funders, that sponsor not only the SANBI but also have contributed in the form of an ‘adopt-a-school’ basis to the programme.

Innovation

The programme enables teachers and learners to transform barren sand-swept schoolyards into world class indigenous gardens. By integrating these gardens into the learning environment of the school, pupils take ownership of maintaning them.

Effectiveness

Five new schools are accepted into the programme each year, meaning that at any specific time there are 15 schools within the three different levels of training. There are currently 34 primary schools, 18 high schools and 10 community organizations actively involved in the programme. Since project inception 77 schools in total have gone through the cycle and/ or are completing their cycle in the Western Cape alone.

Poverty

The project equips unskilled and unemployed community members and learners with horticultural skills that could generate employment and empower them to create gardens at their homes and create entrepreneurial opportunities for the school. 

Sustainability

The current cost of establishing, developing and maintaining a small garden (100m2) over a three-year period including training ground staff and labour from the surrounding community is approximately R50 000. Funders like Vodacom, Woolworths, and the SA Institute for Race Relations and the Amy Biehl Foundation support individual schools, including government sectors like the City of Tygerberg and WC Department of Public Works. Organisations like The Fitzroy Charitable Trust and the Table Mountain Fund are also sponsors to the SANBI. 

Replication

The Outreach Greening Programme in the Western Cape is part of a national programme that has been implemented in five of the national botanical gardens of SANBI in South Africa. These include Pretoria, Walter Sisulu, Free State and Lowveld NBGs. Provinces like the Northern and Eastern Cape have also been targeted despite them not having a NBG.

Partnership

•    South African National Biodiversity Institute

•    Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens

•    Western Cape Education Department

•    Various government, corporate and private donors