Toyota SA ‘Gardens for Africa” project a success
The Gardens for Africa project, introduced by Toyota South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal last year, is proving a great success, and the company has decided to continue support for the programme.
”We started this programme as a pilot project to assist the community of Folweni to establish community gardens and to cleanup the area and earn some income from
selling vegetables from the community gardens and collecting waste products for recycling,” says Zandi Vilakazi, Toyota SA’s Social Development Manager.
Vilakazi said the project has been very successful and four community gardens had been established. Area committees had also been formed to collect waste materials and cleanup the area.
”All this has been done with the full support of the local councillors and community leaders,” said Vilakazi. ”A ‘lecturer’ has been employed to guide the community gardening project as well as to hold workshops on environmental matters and how to generate income from waste recycling. Interest in this project has grown with Keep Durban Beautiful taking over as project manager of the programme.
The Folweni project is similar to the Toyota Urban Conservancy Project (UCP), a
joint venture between Toyota South Africa and the Free State Department of Tourism, Environmental and Economic Affairs. The UCP, launched in the Free State province in 1995, is a unique environmental and conservation project that has created many job opportunities for the unemployed in the Free State.
So far, the programme has trained 214 urban rangers, with the main purpose of
endowing local communities with skills of cleaning up the urban environment and
generating business out of the refuse collected from items such as tins, bottles,
cardboard boxes, plastics (to be recycled) and waste paper (to produce compressed fire blocks).
Communal gardens have also been introduced in certain areas where the community plant vegetables to sell. More than 20 000 trees have been planted in the Free State since the project was started. Some of the trained rangers have been offered permanent jobs by the local municipalities. – Sapa