By Julia Riedel | WCF Education Officer
Club P.A.N. has now been running for nine consecutive years in Côte d’Ivoire around the Taï National Park. During the 2015/2016 school year five schools in Côte d’Ivoire participated with 262 children. The five schools around the Taï National Park were: Sakré, Ziriglo, Gouléako 2, Petit Tiémé and Adamakro.
The 12 Club P.A.N. sessions involved fact sheets, activities, role playing, songs and games with animal puppets which are based around a chosen theme. We aim to promote positive club spirit through interactive learning and essentially having fun. Each child that participated received a Club P.A.N. book and T-Shirt which means a lot to them. Some sessions focused on the concepts of sustainable resource use and the need for protected areas; others detail the natural history of various large protected mammals like chimpanzees and elephants.
During our active conservation session (Number 11) we had great conservation projects including tree planting at each of the five schools.
The newly created ”Health” session (Number 12) from last school year was included into the program again. This session was created by researchers from the Robert Koch-Institute in Berlin, as a response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and concentrates on good hygienic practices for preventing the transmission of diseases.
To have a greater effect on the Club P.A.N. program, it was decided that parents need to be involved; therefore, parents’ days were created at the end of each school year. During these events the children present what they have learnt in form of songs, theatre, and poems to their families and villagers. This year each school held its own parents day, so a total of four events were organized. Only the school of Ziriglo did not organize its event because of a personal conflict with the school principal of Ziriglo and the CPE coordinator Mr. Kouakou, which is very sad, but hopefully solved. On average each of the four events had around 500 adult spectators.
Our evaluation results showed that Club P.A.N. was able to increase the knowledge of the children, not only about the local flora and fauna, but also about biological facts and global environmental issues (Borchers et al. 2013). Furthermore, we were successful in changing attitudes (Borchers et al. 2013) and were able to create a fun and dynamic learning environment that the children enjoyed.
In order to curb the threats of illegal bush-meat hunting and consumption, WCF developed numerous alternative livelihood micro-projects aimed at providing alternative sources of protein such as poultry, goats, cane rats and snails. The school micro-projects provide both an educational activity for many children in the villages but also a means to support the development of the schools. In 2015/2016, WCF supported school micro-projects in Para and Adamakro (goats), Ziriglo (chickens), Petit Tiémé (grass-cutters), and Sakré (snails).
Thanks to YOU, the WCF’s environmental education program was fully active during the 2015/2016 school year in five schools in Côte d’Ivoire.
By Julia Riedel | WCF Education Officer
By Julia Riedel | Project Coordinator
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