Nansana youth receive funds to address climate issues

Recently, 500 youth from Nansana Municipality in Wakiso District received funding to sensitise degraded communities and plant 66,00 trees to restore the environment.

Ms Regina Bakitte, municipality mayor, said these youth comprise 26 groups from Busukuma, Gombe, Nabweru and Nansana divisions with the aim of being ambassadors of combating climate change.

She announced the first batch of funds amounting to Shs145m received under the Youth Climate Fund micro-grant awards supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“This is an opportunity for unemployed youth in Nansana who have been idle to keep them busy as we respond to the government call of restoring the fragile ecosystems and the environment at large,” Ms Bakitte said.

The youth groups came up with different ideas and have received guidance from environmentalists at the municipal council on how this exercise is going to be conducted.

They will plant trees along all highways in Nansana Municipality, institutions such as schools, health centres, worshipping centres, and in their communities.

Other projects include urban farming, use of clean energy, and waste management.  

The mayor revealed that this comes while the government is emphasising the need to restore fragile ecosystems in the area with more than 10,000 households demolished for allegedly encroaching on a gazetted wetland.

Some of the evictees were left stranded in makeshift tents after the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) blew up their investments in the eviction saga.

The evictions have since put Nansana at stake of being one of the areas with increasing crime rates and those terrorising communities at night.

“We have given them money ranging from Shs3m to Shs7m in this first phase and expect them to use the money well and have the balance to start up projects that will help in poverty alleviation campaign,” she noted.

Erismus Paul Makande, a graduate of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Makerere University, heads Budde Application Group innovators, came up with a digital application to create awareness about environmental degradation and climate change in the municipality.

“When we did a literature review, we realised there is no application in the municipality to create awareness,”Makande said.

The application is designed in the sense that it can map different swamps, forests, and display real-time weather conditions in the municipality using a mobile application and a website.

“Since there are very many groups doing tree planting, it will also be able to map the areas where trees are going to be planted,” he said.

The application has a geographic information system (GIS) that will pinpoint areas where fragile ecosystems are being reclaimed.

“It is user-friendly and allows a person to send information from their areas which will be fed to environmentalists at the municipality to ease monitoring exercise,” he explained.  

The group received Shs7million to help them in the development of the application. He, however, said the development of this application is costly.

Namulonge Youth Apostolate group’s Rebecca Nansamba said they have 31 members and their initiative is about urban agriculture in different areas in their locality to do sensitisation campaigns.

“We will go to different schools, churches, mosques and families to help them raise seedlings. We are going to plant spinach and sukuma wiki,” said Nansamba.

She added that this would help the beneficiaries of their campaign get vegetables to be eaten as a side dish and eventually improve on food security.

Stephen Mugalu, a Ssanga Youth empowerment initiative group member, said besides the trees they are planning to plant along Semuto Road, they will use their surplus to start a tailoring centre to skill youth in their group.

Mugalu said the Ssanga group alone would plant 761 trees and they would add more if they received more funding.

Project background 

Ms Bakitte said the call for proposals started in May and many youth submitted their applications but they were able to select only 500 youth between the age of 18 and 24 years.

During this climate mitigation campaign, the young innovators are going to be provided with advice of first looking at the existing bylaws concerning waste management.

“We have already started enacting the tree planting bylaw and the wetland extortion bylaw,” she explained.

Her initiative followed a survey conducted in Nansana by The African Male Leadership Initiative that revealed that out of all the young people, at least 48 percent were unemployed and only 12 percent had jobs.

“We want to reduce unemployment among the young people by 25 percent by 2026 and enable them to start up sustainable businesses,” she said adding that priority was given to school dropouts.

Ms Bakitte said the second phase of this programme that will start in October, they expect more funding of $100, 000 (approximately Shs372.5 m).

The Youth and Climate Action Fund is a campaign currently running in 38 countries across the world targeting 62 million residents and funded by United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation.

With this funding, the mayor wants the residents of Nansana to keep sanitation within the townships to curb diseases especially those coming from filthy areas such as the slums.