Environment

Our Community Empowerment Program (CEP) equips community members with the knowledge and skills to find creative and sustainable solutions to problems. During the CEP, participants learn how the most common diseases are transmitted. They also learn about the ways in which environmental conditions contribute to health challenges and measures they can take to address them. Our respectful and non-judgmental approach promotes community discussion about the environment. As a result, communities lead initiatives to make their environments more resilient in order to protect the community’s wider health.

The CEP also supports communities to install and use basic, available technologies such as adapted wood stoves and to conduct collective projects like tree-planting. We partner with environmental organizations such as Seed Program International and Taaru Askan to offer equitable access to agricultural skills training and resources for women such as quality seed. The aim is to enable community members to implement decentralized, small-scale food production and income-generation strategies that are resilient to climate change and enrich rather than degrade the land.

Finally, Tostan’s model supports the resilience of communities and women and girls more broadly through our training in leadership, financial management, and literacy to help them find new economic opportunities and build their capacity to identify and make progress on a range of areas, increasing their resilience in the face of the climate crisis and other interconnected challenges.