Rural students lead initiative to clean the environment
Universal Greening Organization (UGO), a student-led organisation, believes that rural people fail to see the negative impact of throwing rubbish into rivers and wetlands. As a result, they have launched clean-up campaigns in order to educate them.
“Our organisation was established to ensure that our environment is safe, clean and healthy to live in. A polluted environment poses a lot of health hazards. We go to rural villages to conduct environmental awareness programmes since people still need to be taught about the importance of keeping their environment clean. Clean local rivers are important to our lives,” said Talifhani Tshitwamulomoni (24), UGO, chairperson, and a registered student at the University of Venda.
Responsibility
“As UGO, we feel that environmental education is lacking. More environmental education and cleaning campaigns should be done as cleaning with the community makes them aware of their responsibility for their environment. Over the years we have created awareness in many areas in Vhembe,” he said.
Some of the major objectives they hope to achieve through their cleaning campaign are to eliminate diseases such as cholera and malaria which thrive in a dirty environment. Last year, Health-e News reported about how residents were blaming the dirty rivers for the high rate of malaria cases. Most rivers in the area have been turned into illegal dumping sites, turning them into polluted health hazards.
“Environment is a place where humans as well as plants and animals live. Keeping it clean and neat is our responsibility. It is necessary to keep our environment clean because a polluted environment leads to sicknesses and diseases such as malaria,” said Tshitwamulomoni.
He added: “Polluted water carries bacteria that are harmful to people. A clean environment particularly offers us clean air for breathing.”
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Rural students lead initiative to clean the environment
by NdivhuwoMukwevho, Health-e News
August 7, 2018