Mathuba Schools & Citizens River Health Programme

Article from Stephen Coan

The Witness

Date: 30 Jan 2013

The Umthombo Enviro Club at Umthombo Secondary School in Mpophomeni meet on a regular basis in one of the school’s classrooms. At their last meeting the image of planet Earth appeared on one of the cream-painted classroom walls courtesy of a projector linked to a laptop. The GoogEarth image to be precise. The globe tilted and after a vertigo moment you plunged down towards the planet to suddenly find yourself hovering above Mpophomeni.

“That is your township as an eagle would see it if it flew over,” said Louine Boothway of the EcoSchools Programme, an international project active in 51 countries, who facilitates the club meetings.

Zooming closer pop up flags appeared on the screen, clicking on them revealed what members of the Umthombo Enviro Club had been up to lately. Photographs showed members participating in a project drawing attention to the sewage problems experienced in parts of Mpophomeni.

One photograph featured club member Olwethu Ngcobo interviewing a local woman using a cellphone. “I recorded her telling me about the area just below her property that is polluted with sewage and how her children cannot play outside Ngcobo told the club.

These photographs and the environmental issues they highlight can be seen by anyone who signs up to the Mathuba Schools and Citizens River Health Programme which uses cell phone technology to report, discuss and take action on issues affecting the health of local rivers.

For a generation forwhom hi-tech is second nature participating in the programme is simplicity itself. First you use a cellphone or camera to take photographs or write comments on local environmental issues and then post them onto a specialaddress at Flickr; you can then share your pictures on Flickr and chat about what they depict.

By downloading SCRHP files from the Mathuba website you can then open them with Google Earth to discover what other members of the Mathuba Programme are experiencing where they live.

Mathuba is Zulu for “an opportunity” or “now is the time” and while the programme is aimed primarily at youth anyone can sign up who wants to work with other organisations in developing and promoting school-based research activities.

Its early days yet and there are just a handful of members, including the UmthomboEnviro Club, Empopomeni Eco Champions and Imbali Organic Farming but the programme clearly has a global potential thanks to its use of the internet.

The Mathuba Programme is a collaboration organised by UKZN School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences and headed up by senior lecturer Mark Dent.“It’s designed to encourage learners to take a lifelong interest in the health of rivers, their immediate environments and the catchments to which they are connected,”says Dent.

The other organisations collaborating in Mathubare Duzi Umgeni Conservation Trust (DUCT), Wildlife and Environmental Society of South Africa (WESSA), Msunduzi Innovation and Development Institute, Working for Wetlands, Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute, Umgeni Water and Wildlands Conservation Trust.

Dent had been pondering the need for such an environmental internet programme for some years but his meeting with environmental educator Lynn Hurry a year ago proved the necessary catalyst to its creation.

“Mark had a good idea but he needed someone to get it going,” says Hurry who is now an associate on the Mathuba programme. “I had good network of contacts via my work with WESSA and was able to connect the people to get it up and running.”

According to Dent much of the thinking underlying the intellectual core in Mathuba isbased on the work of Peter Senge, Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management who has devised a social learning model for the collection and dissemination of information on environmental issues that leads toan improvedunderstanding,which in turn creates innovative solutions.

Dent sees the programme as being of use to people and organisations already working in the environmental field and for new comers. “Citizens of all ages can put up what they doing on the Mathuba Programme. This is a process for10-year-olds to PhDs and beyond.”

In this way it is envisaged Mathuba will grow into an environmental network for the exchange of information and problem-solving, one that also taps into the potential of social media.“Individuals can do nothing but as a collective people can act to make things happen,” says Dent. “The Arab Spring comes to mind, except that this revolution will lead to healthy rivers and healthy people.”

As the Mathuba programme expands mentors will be brought on board who will receive all the incoming pictures and comments and then use Google Earth to accurately locate each and every observation. It will then be available to everyone in the Mathuba network.

“Perhaps what is more important about Mathuba is what happens before the image is booted on to Google Earth,” says Boothway, “the moment learners realise they have something important to offer, something significant. The global component opens learners to the fact they live in a bigger world and that they are relevant and can communicate with people in other countries, share their stories and know their stories are valuable.”

“One day, in India or Germany, or anywhere in the world,someone can click on the Umthombo Enviro Club link and find Olwethu in Mpophomeni doing an interview on a cellphone. These learners are not only talking to their community but communicating to a broader network of global information and we anticipate it will enhance their feeling of connectedness and self-esteem.”