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Environmental education is an increasingly prominent issue as the importance of building climate-resilient communities around the world becomes more urgent. In Rwanda, Professor Ricardo Sabates has been part of a team exploring the impact and potential of a Cambridge-backed project called “One Child, One Tree” (OCOT), which aims to engage school children in nature-based education through tree planting.

OCOT is an initiative run by the Mental Health and Behaviour Research Group at the University of Rwanda College of Medicine and Health Sciences. It aims to encourage a natural instinct to protect nature among children, while also promoting their psychosocial wellbeing and bringing communities together through the shared activity of tree-planting.

The initiative is funded by the Mastercard Foundation and Cambridge’s Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund. Ricardo is part of the team exploring the educational component of the intervention and its potential for adaptations to achieve scale, and was involved in a series of meetings and workshops on OCOT in Rwanda earlier this month.

Preliminary research findings on the intervention suggest it is making a positive change in environmental stewardship and the psychosocial well-being of participating children. OCOT is not the only organisation focusing on these issues in the region, and the team also visited a school supported by ARCOS, an organisation which encourages the greening and beautification of schools, conservation and restoration, kitchen gardens and school production supporting the families of the most disadvantaged students. Meetings also took place with experts from the University of Rwanda’s College of Education to discuss environmental education in primary school curricula and potential alignment with the OCOT initiative, while a whole-day workshop also explored future scalability. The team also met government officials to discuss alignment with wider education policy in Rwanda.