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Schools from different districts in Ankole and Kigezi subregions have joined Vision Group’s Green Schools Initiative, which is targeting to involve over 90,000 learners in activities to mitigate climate change.

During a one-day orientation workshop for coordinators of the Green Schools Initiative that took place at Vision Group regional offices in Mbarara city, the teachers said addressing climate change needed a concerted effort by all.

The Green Schools Initiative is being implemented by New Vision in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) with financing from the Embassy of Sweden in Uganda.

The teachers, who came with an open mind to acquire new approaches and skills on how to mitigate climate change challenges, hailed the initiative for creating awareness among young people in different schools about keeping the environment green and ecosystem-friendly.

“The intervention is making sense in a way that they are sensitising people on exactly what should be done to save the environment,” the Rev. Jocus Kangume, the deputy headteacher of Ntare School, stated.

Justine Anyijukire from Bishop Comboni College Kambuga and Nuwagaba Bruce from Bishop Kivengyere High School Muyebe, believe the innovation, once adopted by all Ugandans and fully funded, is the best way that will help to address the challenges of climate change.

Addressing teachers at the workshop, Sidney Miria, the head of special projects at Vision Group, challenged schools to use their platforms and look out for innovative approaches to tackling climate change and causing positive change in their communities.

“There is a lot to do with advocacy, mind and behaviour change as the issue of climate change affects both you and me and the risk is high. ‘‘Vision Group, with all its platforms, cannot tackle this challenge alone, FAO and teachers cannot tackle the challenge alone, but together we can and that is why we are here,” Miria told teachers.

Annet Namuli, the regional agro-pastoral and farmer field school assistant at FAO’s Masaka sub-office, urged schools to engage learners in activities aimed at addressing climate change challenges.

Namuli noted with concern that the world is facing unpredictable changes in terms of occurrences and frequency of extreme events driven by climate, namely, floods, drought, heat waves, landslides, and pest and disease outbreaks and this calls for a concerted effort to combat the problem.

She urged young people to use the knowledge acquired from school to go down and teach communities different aspects of mitigating climate change.

“Climate change is not only affecting the farmer or livestock, but it is also affecting our schools. Climate change has affected us in many ways due to our poor farming methods,” Namuli added.

About Green Schools 

Vision Group’s Green Schools Initiative started last year. The project is a two-track programme; one track has debate and the other has projects that the schools will carry out over seven months. According to Miria, a total of 100 schools are participating in the project.

“Phase one was more or less like a pilot project and for phase two, we would like to reaffirm some of the activities that were carried out in phase one. We have new schools that have come on board and we are hoping for more vibrant and innovative projects much more than we had last year,” he said.

Miria reported that in the first phase of implementation, their target was to reach out to 90,000 students and they exceeded the expectations by reaching out to over 100,000 with the message on climate change.

“This time around, we still maintain the target we had in terms of students we would like to reach in the seven months,” he said.

Miria further noted that during the campaign, they will conduct debates at the regional level and all schools that are participating in the project will come up with different innovative projects.

Embrace newspapers in education

Under this project period, each of the participating schools will have access to 50 copies of the Weekend Vision edition, which will publish a special pullout that addresses issues to do with climate change.

Teachers and students are expected to write climate change-related articles.  

Miria challenged schools to use newspapers innovatively to deliver the curriculum to the learners.

He also attributed the low grades and academic performance in schools to the poor reading culture among students.

“Research has shown that learners who use newspapers as a principal source of material have better achievement scores than their counterparts who rely on only textbooks,”

Miria said. “We trained teachers today on how to use newspapers in education, which is a global movement that encourages the use of newspapers to deliver the curriculum. With a new competence-based curriculum, they will find newspapers in the classroom as a novel innovative way of delivering the curriculum of teaching learners,” Miria noted.