The majority of children from communities that surround the Rhodes Matopos National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern Zimbabwe, have never been inside the Park and yet they live within 10km of its boundary. This is because of their inability to afford transport to and drives through the Park, as well as park entry fees. We would like to organise a trip for the children from surrounding schools to the national park. Apart from getting to see the biodiversity in the Park, the children will also have the opportunity to network and share ideas on natural resources with the children from the other communities. This will create a basis for conservation collaborations in the future. We are in need of US$1500 to provide them with transport to and through the park, to cover park entry fees for the pupils and vehicles and to provide meals during the trip.

We are a small non-profit conservation and research organisation who are entirely dependant on donor funding. Since 2012, we have been running Biodiversity Conservation Clubs in 5 rural schools of communities that border the Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe. The children are highly motivated in their learning and have collected wonderful and meaningful environmental information to date, which we use to troubleshoot the environmental degradation that these areas are facing. However, the fact that the children have never seen a protected area causes a gap within our programme in that we teach the children about biodiversity using their environmentally degraded environs (in the communal areas) as the demonstration field. Ideally, they should learn from a protected area such as Matopos National Park which has a standard ecostystem so that they use it as a reference to the kind of environment they aim to achieve in their conservation activities. Our organisation is currently hard-pressed with finances as we are barely able to cover the cost of supporting our activities of running the conservation clubs.

Your contribution to this cause will help us in training these children environmental issues, with the aiming of producing environmental stewards. This will consequently contribute to conservation of the environment in Zimbabwe.