Youth Speaker entry #7: Ronald Onyang (Uganda)

“Africans Focused on Global Warming and Development” (AFOGWAD) is an initiative of concerned African communities on the alarming effects of climate change. It also comprises of committed people focused on limiting the causes of global warming and the advocacy for the adaptation to the resulting impacts of climate change. AFOGWAD is a civil society, non-governmental and non-profiting organization focused on initiating and empowering communities’ activities that help mitigate on the causes of the climate change. It is based in Lira district, Northern region of Uganda.

AFOGWAD objectives are to enhance on forestation and forest conservation, advocacy for adaptation to climate smart agriculture, advocacy for the adaptation to the renewable sources of energy and foster the policies that work towards climate change mitigation. Our major mission is to initiate activities which advocate for proper measures on climate change and enhancing community participation for a healthy and sustainable development, with a goal of strengthening and enhancing community’s capacity and partner organization for a greener environmental protection, and a vision of building a responsible community focused on a greener revolution and welfare of the people.

Tree nursery for pines and oranges

At the moment, AFOGWAD is implementing a project “community leadership in addressing climate change.” In this project we have set up community demonstration tree nursery bed in some of the communities we are operating in. The community around each demonstration grounds is trained on how to raise young tree seedlings, most especially the pines, budding and grafting of fruit tree seedlings like oranges and mangoes to ensure the sustainability of the project. The community is also trained on how to look after these young trees after from the nursery bed. We also use these meetings with them to tell them how serious the need for us to plant trees now and not tomorrow is. This is helping us to get really the community understanding on the climate change, and partially we found out that their knowledge about this global threat is still very low, hence there is still much need for this advocacy.

AFOGWAD is also looking forward to implementing a project called “elders keep for us tree campaign.” In this campaign we are looking at the children and the youth taking a lead in planting trees. We found out that if we help raise the passion of our fellow young people towards climate change mitigation, we will have conquered the whole community. Young people contribute to the greatest population in the areas we are operating in and also still very energetic to act vigorously. We want them to be aware of the extent of the impacts of climate change today and yet the communities have already started experiencing it badly especially in agricultural harvests, health threats like the used not to be allergies. And if all these are already happening at this stage today, then to what extent will it be tomorrow, when we will be the ones managing that generation and our elders whom today we are seeing cutting down trees anyhow, while us also just watching and without tasking them to replace them? This will really create in them a sense of serious action now. We also do a lot of advocacy through social media like on face book.
I just have too much to share about this field that I cannot explain all at the moment, but I hoped to do a lot in XIV WFC in Durban South Africa.

Blogpost, video and photo submitted by Ronald Onyang (Africans Focused on Global Warming and Development/AFOGWAD, Uganda) – onyangronald(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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