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In May at Xigera Safari Lodge, we unveiled a brand-new partnership with Wild Entrust Africa to introduce three impactful new community-focused projects, covering conservation, education and women’s empowerment, for the region’s local Habu community.

Together, we are working on new sustainable social enterprise and community development projects which include, The Village Greens & Women’s Empowerment Project, Village Lights and Coaching Conservation Programme. Read more about these programmes.

Dan Myburg

© Dan Myburg

This month, hear more from Wild Entrust Africa on what progress has been made so far over the past couple of months...

Village Greens – women and youth cooperative

July

Advances to The Village Greens programme were made. We reinforced the garden pump house, connecting the JoJo tank to the water reticulation system, and identifying and garnering funds for two new positions in garden maintenance and security. 

The development of the Women and Youth Cooperative continued as planned, under guidance from the Local Entrepreneurial Agency (LEA), and we aimed to have the executive committee selected and the cooperative registered by the end of August.

August

Having previously met with villagers from Habu and obtained consensus for the establishment of a Habu Women and Youth Cooperative, a second meeting of prospective members of the co-operative was convened again in Habu on 19th August.

The liaison officer at the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s Department for Cooperative Development in the district is Ms Rebeccah Korejezu. She is very keen to engage with the newly elected Steering Committee in order to register the organisation by end of September 2021.

Village Lights – Children's reading initiative

July

We held a meeting on 14th June, which introduced the Village Greens and Village Lights projects to unemployed women and youth of Habu village and since then, we have got to work, making sure that the village lights package was ready.

The children’s books packages included 10 different reading materials (written by Batswana writers) the solar light and coloured pencils were prepared.

We are currently at the beginning of the baseline survey. The survey is essential for our monitoring and evaluation. The key thing is to examine what impact the provision of lights will have, and what the reading materials provided taught the children as well as helping them learn to read generally. A post-survey will be conducted after the distribution of the children's packages for data comparison.

Schools closed early due to the rising number of Covid-19 cases, inhibiting us from distributing the packages or pursuing conversations about the Village Lights. We did however prepare for schools to reopen.

We aim to recruit a local young person who will be in Habu full-time carrying out our programmes. These will include the Village Lights book club with the intention of children learning to read, while, reading to learn. Creating a book club will also help us identify the reading levels of learners.

August

The Coaching Conservation Team were in Habu for four days, doing baseline work for the Village Lights project.

Okavango Filming joined us to capture stories for our media coverage. We covered 'a day in the life' of an 11-year-old girl and her mother. The aim is to understand a normal day-to-day life in the village prior to us giving every upper primary student a village Lights package.

This is to ensure that our monitoring and evaluation protocols are followed and we are able to show impact and change as a result of the initiative. After the children have received the lights and books we hope to see a vast difference in how they spend their day especially the younger children.

The survey is designed to obtain baseline information about what sort of artificial lights are being used in the households and what type of reading the children and adults were doing. In the three days we were there, we managed to survey 117 households in and around Habu. The experience was beneficial for the coaches who had a chance to interact with the villagers and talk about our programme with the community. It also helped to introduce them to all the other Wild Entrust projects being carried out in Habu.

As planned in July, we have identified Kewarona Lasaro as a potential Education Officer who will work under both Coaching Conservation and Community Coexistence as a liaison. He is a renowned traditional dancer and loves to read. We look forward to him joining our team.