Plan

The multi-faceted approach described below includes demonstration areas, home grown wood and the introduction of energy saving technologies, all accentuated by a comprehensive education campaign.

Education

The centerpiece of the project’s education outreach is a traveling movie show. Films documenting Uganda’s wildlife are shown at schools, churches, and other community meeting places. Before and after each showing of a film, storytellers, singers and dancers, and other artistic expressions of environmental awareness situate the film within a locally entertaining cultural context, generating interest in the national park and introducing the fuel wood project. Another aspect of the education campaign, the Science Center teaches about Kibale's wildlife using artifacts from the park. The first museum of its kind in Uganda, the center helps generate a lot of interest in the project's other goals.

Energy-Related Innovations

Based on successful programs elsewhere in Uganda and around the globe, we promote:

• Family Stoves - Stove designs tested recently in Uganda have been shown to use 60-80% less wood than conventional stoves. Not only do they conserve wood, they also improve health and quality of life for the entire household.
• Solar Stoves – Locally available materials will be utilized to build demonstration parabolic solar stoves at project sites, with plans made available for replication.
• Shrub Borders - A hedge of Sesbania sesban planted as a border around a one-hectare farm is capable of producing about half of an average family's needs. Much faster growing than most trees, this particular species is ready for harvest as fuel wood as little as six months after planting, and can sustain several harvests each year.

Home-Grown Wood

During the pilot phase, six demonstration areas have been created around Kibale. Although the number of seedlings produced at each demonstration plot will be considerable, their more important function is to generate interest in home-grown fuel wood. We hope to promote the feasibility of farming fuel wood with extremely fast growing species, such as Sesbania, while highlighting the relative ease of doing so compared with collecting wood from the National Park.