Teachers Training

Hamideh Hashemi from Green Africa Global Foundation started the workshop with some important points; Teachers should be effective  ambassadors concerning health and environmental management to their students and the community at large. They were asked to pick two students from each class to be group leaders. She played a short video regarding environmental management in particular of the Kenyan waste management. She explained the program and the activities involved, and informed the students will participate to conserve their ecosystem and solve environmental – problems leading to significant improvements with their own efforts. The school will be a Nature Protection Center and each of them will be a member of the center as well as a Guardian of Nature.

Mercy Wamaitha representative of community cooker explained about The Community Cooker activities, this is an initiative about practical waste to energy stove that has tremendous potential for the environmental, and economic change in low resource settings around the world. The community collects and burns rubbish to generate low cost heat that can be used for cooking, baking, heating, and boiling water. 

The potential benefits of using such cookers, they include: 

• Reduced deforestation 
• Carbon emissions and pollution
• Improved health and reduced levels of violence
• Lower costs
• Better energy access can also create livelihood opportunities and could improve relations between displaced people and local populations by supporting an enterprise or generating benefits for both communities.

The Community Cooker is not only a viable solution for multiple environmental & health issues in informal settlements but also provides valuable and innovative ways at tackling similar issues in refugee camps worldwide.

Some Benefits of Community Cooker 

• Cooking and baking 
• Hot water – daily capacity of 800 liters
• Clean water 

This community has run different cookers as Mark1 (Kibira 2008), Mark2 (lower kabete, 2011), Mark3 (Karagita, 2012), Mark4 (Kawangwar, 2013) and Mark5( Lower Kabete,2015 

The training of teachers of the lenana junior school was conducted on Friday 6th of October 2017.It was organized by Green Africa Global foundation in collaboration with Iran medical clinics in Kenya. In this program, 10 school teachers are trained. 

Representative from the two sides were responsible for disseminating the information. This followed after a one month education of the same to the pupils of lenana junior school from pre unit to the class eight. Teaching the teachers what their students have been taught was necessary to ensure that they stress to them the issues that were involved, also for partnership and coordination of the project from the administration side with the aim of the teachers, parents and students owning the project. It was based on the following themes; 

• Waste and waste management education 
• Culture and conservation
• Water and sanitation
• Nutrition

Waste and its management is a crucial issue in achieving sustainability and promotion of environmental conservation and also improving on the economy of our nation. The content on this was to make the teachers aware of what wastes are0, types of waste , origin of the waste and the strategies to be used in managing it. They were sensitized on solid and liquid wastes, domestic activities that bring about formation of waste like waste water, biomedical wastes that originated from medical practices, electrical waste like the used computers that the school admitted of having among other origins of the wastes. 

The forum was based on a teacher classroom approach where a presenter had to give a talk and in doing so engage the participants in the talk by asking of question, discussion and clarification of issues that were not well articulated. On the waste management strategies, they were introduced on the 3Rs concept of reducing, reusing and recycling of the waste.

• Waste Management

Waste and its management is a crucial issue in achieving sustainability and promotion of environmental conservation and also improving on the economy of our nation. The content on this was to make the teachers aware of what wastes are0, types of waste , origin of the waste and the strategies to be used in managing it. 

• Culture & Conservation

Culture is the way of living of the people and is diverse from different social settings like communities among others. Our concerns on this were mainly on cultural heritage conservation by preventing cultural erosion.  To the teachers, cultural values, skills of the past is going extinct and the students are not able to carry out some simple cultural practices that promote sustainability of values and transformation of the society. It was evident that western education has brought about changes that do not preserve cultures any more.

• Health & Nutrition

This part was well elaborated by an expert from Iran medical clinics in Kenya who divided her work on malaria education, sanitation and hygiene and also on balancing diets. The teachers were mentored on how malaria crisis might befall the school and ways of preventing it. These include draining off stagnant water, clearing bushes around and avoiding keeping broken bottles as they act as breeding grounds for mosquito. They were also taught on ways of treating the disease. 

On sanitation and hygiene, the school was commented on that despite being in a slum area their sanitation is not that bad as the school compound looked generally clean however small it is. The teachers were told to keep reminding their students on hand washing after visiting the latrines. A challenge here came on the facilities that the school is having compared to the population which concluded that hand washing facilities are limited and should be improved.