Rural Poverty Alleviation
GREEN Eco-Campus Model
Support students to build their own eco-campus on a 4,500 hectare nature reserve donated by the Oppenheimer family. Funding needed to build the first 2 eco houses.
Project Details
Rural Expansion: Develop a rurally-based campus at Ezemvelo Nature Reserve, part of the Diamond Route, created as a model that is 'green' and environmentally friendly, as well as financially self-sustaining. Students guided by experts will build their own housing, dining-room, classrooms, and ablutions using traditional earth-brick manufacturing and building techniques, and whole-log techniques as an invader forest is available of wattle, bluegum, and poplar trees. Students all learn to grow their own organic food. World-class experts teach students to manage the eco-technologies, including solar and water and waste management, and are also trained by experts in conservation, research, leadership, eco-tourism and hospitality management.
The vision for the campus is to showcase the best methods to teach rural and squatter communities how to get safe beautiful eco-housing, organic food, tele-communications, natural prevention-oriented health care, education, and waste-management for a small fraction of the cost of the norm. In this way individuals become personally self-sufficient and become generators of economic growth and self-sufficiency for their communities. We wish to create this as a Centre of Excellence in working methodologies of the finest methods of rural poverty alleviation.
Proving that:
- ‘Green’ and ‘eco’ need not be the domain of the wealthy, but accessible to the poor and in fact the sustainable way out of poverty
- Housing; food; water; education; health-care, can all be provided in a sustainable, ‘enlightened’ ,healthy, non-toxic way, attractive way, at tiny cost
Your Support Provides:
- Capital injection of required funding to build the first two prototype dorm housing
- The research needed on benefits and disadvantages of various eco-housing systems
- Writing the policies, systems, and administrative packages
Your generous contribution to the Rural Poverty Alleviation Model will ensure that we meet our ultimate goal of $350,000 to create a total rural eco-campus which will be used to train 4,000 disadvantaged youth and community leaders per annum in methodologies that transform their housing, food, water, waste-management, and energy-usage situation