(Education, Health Care, Food Security & Agriculture, Natural resource management, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Community Resilience, Youth leadership Youth leadership)

Education

Illiteracy and lack of educational opportunities remain major barriers to the development of African countries. Despite the progress achieved in increasing the overall literacy rate since 1990, 37 percent of sub-Saharan African adults cannot read or write as of 2011. We believe that promoting literacy and education for children and youth will help to ensure a promising future for development.

Access to education is key to the empowerment of young people. Education is also a key step to sustaining democracies, improving health, increasing per capita income, and conserving environmental resources.

Recognizing the importance of education as a basic need, Scion Trust supports efforts to provide education and vocational training for men, women, and children.

Among other ways:

Sponsorship,

Scholarships,

Mentorship programs,

Vocational   training program
capacity building for Teachers,

Building schools

Health Care

Africa’s widespread poverty, in addition to a shortage of medicine, adequate hospitals, trained doctors and nurses, contributes to the healthcare crisis. As a result, the life-expectancy of  a person living in sub-Saharan Africa is 54.9years as of 2013—23.8 years.

In addition to a shorter life-expectancy, Africa has some of the highest maternal and child mortality rates in the world. For example, in Sierra Leone the mortality rates for children under-five and new mothers are the highest in the world, with treatable sicknesses like pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, infectious diseases and worm infestation contributing to the high mortality rates.

In addition to these preventable illnesses, maternal health is a major concern in Africa. Often women must give birth in their own homes, with no medical assistance or post-natal treatment, due to the inaccessibility of hospitals and nurses. This puts both mother and child at risk for health complications that could otherwise be prevented with the proper medical care.

Capacity building, training midwifes == re

Placing qualified volunteer paramedics

Medical camps

Medical facilities

Food Security & Agriculture

In Africa as much as 60 percent of the labor force is employed in agriculture, but agriculture only accounts for 25 percent of the continent’s GDP, according to the African Economic Outlook Report 2013.

With this in mind, Africa remains the continent with the largest food deficit in the world, as one-third of its people suffer from malnutrition. In addition to malnutrition, food insecurity leads to environmental degradation, poverty, and a wide range of health problems. That is why Bread and Scion Trust emphasizes our agricultural programs so strongly: many facets of life in rural Africa will improve as more people achieve food security.

With this in mind, we know all too well that long-term food security is a battle that can only be won when villagers develop and sustain their own food supply. With your help our local partners will be able to educate farmers about modern agriculture practices while providing more adequate supplies and equipment, so that farmers can provide food for their families and communities and sell surplus crops to generate a steady income.

This program also supports:

Veterinary and field support services

Promoting livestock ownership programs

Agricultural tools

Financing capital

Farm inputs and tools

Value addition programs

Market chain linkages

Water and Soil conservation programs – promoting organic farming, Composting – soil fertility restoration technologies 

Natural resource management

Current deforestation trends point toward catastrophic and irreversible losses of biodiversity and runaway climate change. The most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for millions of species. Seventy percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes. (Nat Geo)

We work to ensure communities can live sustainably without having a negative impact on the ecosystems and biodiversity around them. We support communities to better manage their natural resources in order to generate jobs, value and wellbeing from their existing natural resources. We put youth at the heart of this by giving them the skills, knowledge and support to build the capacity of rural communities to raise awareness and call for policy changes.

Our projects combine promoting sustainable and environmentally friendly livelihoods with immersing young people in areas of outstanding natural importance, giving them a sense of why nature must be protected.

We work in communities that live in the buffer zones around national parks, encouraging lifestyles that protect biodiversity without restricting their need to develop. We contribute towards research that generates global awareness of the importance of natural resources. In rainforests, where volunteers have access to some of the most bio diverse places on earth, we support scientists and researchers to carry out their work.

Other interventions include:

Promoting adaptive technologies like permaculture and agroforestry

Solar energy, Energy saving stove, briquettes,

Reforestation – reforestation and tree planting programs

Anti-Poaching – community based wildlife and protected areas conservation programs.

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

Tragically, thousands of children die every year from water-borne illnesses that are easily preventable. Where there is unsafe water, there are diseases. In the rural communities, the need for clean water is extremely urgent and a top priority.

Water is life!  We support programs that provide access to clean water and educate people about the vital importance of clean water for the prevention of diseases.

We focus on improving access to safe water and sanitation services, and inspiring behaviour change in communities. Through working with volunteers, hygiene practices improve both in individual homes and the community as a whole. Our approach focuses on improving health and hygiene in communities, whilst contributing to positive change around gender equality, local governance, school attendance and environmental awareness.

Community Resilience

We support people to build their capacity and capability to respond to environmental, social and economic challenges. Our projects bring groups of people together to plan for the future and address the issues they face as a community.

A lack of employment opportunities is one of the factors driving migration of young people from rural areas towards cities. In Nicaragua and Tanzania, we work with young entrepreneurs in rural communities to improve their livelihoods and gain further knowledge on running their businesses.

Youth leadership

Our programs bring together young volunteers from a diverse range of backgrounds and nationalities, to inspire and further develop them as active citizens.

We believe that young people can be agents of change on both a global and local scale. Often these young people are excluded from decision making that affects them because of a lack of knowledge, skills or voice. We tackle this issue by challenging young people to go beyond their comfort zones on a trek or as a leader during a placement, engaging in structured reflection activities throughout.

Projects undertaken within one of the other thematic programs always have a youth leadership component in their design. All participants are involved in a curriculum of active citizenship that encourages development of the key knowledge and skills required to be able to tackle issues that matter to each individual.