Youth Speaker entry #5: Bamidele Oni (Nigeria)

While, I work towards building a formidable and extended reach of work and impact in my society in the future, I have begun with the establishment of a means of reaching the public through the establishment of a Non-Governmental Organization and through which, I have realized a means to bridging the information gap between societal development stakeholders (policy makers, researchers) and the public.

While there have been a lot of interventions towards combating the negative impacts of the rapid environmental changes, I realized the need for a more identifiable way of creating a levelled form of environmental education and entrepreneurship that would not only create the necessary awareness but also a means to establishing a mitigation strategy.

I adopted the process of community-community approach of environmental sensitization and tree planting as a means to adapting and mitigating the changes. The tree planting initiative has however been based on fast yielding and social-economic consideration as the trees often selected are ones that would ensure a beneficial side not only to the environment but also to the individuals in terms of food security (fruit trees) and health values.

The platform has further been used to bring the rural dwellers, youths, students, non-profit leaders, policy makers and entrepreneurs to design solutions that reflect local content for a green economy. The youths from respective communities have also overtime shown supports in volunteering for the tree planting project while each community reached often collect seeds from the trees planted in their localities to give to us and this has further helped to enhance our seed stock for more planting.

Right now, the initiative has reached 15 communities with 4000 trees planted.
The success of this project has helped to understand the necessity of ensuring that ideas and initiative directed at enhancing communities must be truly people oriented and well-tailored to accommodate mutual understanding between the parties involved in an intervention.

Blogpost, video and photo submitted by Bamidele Oni (Nigeria) – bamideleoni.greenimpact(at)gmail.com

The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.

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This post is published as an application by the author, to speak as a youth representative at the World Forestry Congress. Have a look at the other entries too!

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