Environmental research

The Bana Project is a centre for care for orphaned and vulnerable children. Among its core programmes are the weekly feeding programme and sessions for equipping the children with survival skills. The centre thrives on monthly contributions by the members and depends heavily on biomass to meet its cooking needs. Even though there is a fairly large piece of land for crop production to meet the needs of the feeding programme, there isn t much done due to financial limitation of the Centre. Following briefing of the local community council about the GEF-Small Grants Programme, a member of the Council assisted the Centre to develop a proposal to build the capacity of the centre so that it can go beyond feeding and equip the children with knowledge about the environmental challenges facing the country with demonstration of simple technologies and strategies for addressing the challenges. The following interventions are being implemented by the Centre: - Harnessing of solar energy to meet the lighting and water pumping needs and powering audio-visual equipment for exposing children to what other children in the same predicament in the country and elsewhere are doing to survive and to protect their country s environment and natural resources - Water harvesting, particularly roof water harvesting for household vegetable production and other domestic uses - Waste management particularly, sewage, which is becoming costly as the centre uses pit latrines which need to be emptied from time to time to install a biogas system which produce gas to meet the cooking needs of the centre and produce the needed fertilizer for production of crops to meet the needs of the feeding programme of the centre - Tree planting campaigns for the youth and children

Lesotho