Environmental Education and One School’s Initiative: Using a Garden Project to Spread Environmental Awareness and Poverty Alleviation Vuyisile Msila 1 University of South Africa, College of Education, PO Box 392, UNISA 0003 South Africa E-mail: msilavt@unisa.ac.za KEYWORDS Relevance. Subject Integration. School Community Links. Values. Democracy ABSTRACT The current environmental education curriculum aims to ensure that all South Africans develop the responsibility to conserve and respect the environment. Schools are under much pressure to lead the effective spread of environmental education. This paper explores the findings of a case study from one school’s garden project. Situated in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the school started a Garden for All Project (GAP) to fight poverty among its learners. Not only was the GAP successful in combating poverty, it enabled the school to reach out to the community as they collaborated on environmental education. The researchers used qualitative approaches, gathering data through interviews and observations. Not only did the learners benefit from nutritious healthy meals made possible by the project, but they also learnt about other learning areas and the importance of the school’s links with the community. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Omtoyin and Sanda (2012) point out that poverty is a social condition characterised by the inadequacy of access to basic human needs for the maintenance of socially acceptable mini- mum standard of living. Many developing coun- tries such as South Africa experience this phe- nomenon. Learners in majority of schools come from families who experience poverty. Agholor and Obi (2013) point that in South Africa there is a strong linkage between agricultural produc- tivity and poverty alleviation. These authors also write about how government has proclaimed in 1994 the right of people to use various ap- proaches in fighting poverty. Education has also been perceived as a tool for combating poverty. “The school feeding programme initiated by the government allows children who have been en- rolled in the primary school access to one meal a day” (Agholor and Obi 2013:90). In addition to this though, many schools have initiated their own poverty alleviation strategies. A number of authors have emphasised the need to improve the prominence of child rights in poverty re- duction strategy processes (Espey et al. 2010). This article focuses on a case study of a primary school that initiated a garden project for orphans in the school. The project was meant to help feed the indigent learners in the school. About half of the school’s 587 learners benefited from the project. Buhl (2012) highlights the require- ment for schools to meet the needs of poor children. She argues that hunger and malnutri- tion among children in developing countries continues to impair health, quality of life and survival. As mentioned briefly above, when the post-apartheid government came into power in 1994, the national school feeding policy was introduced. Three pillars of this feeding scheme were (a) to have a school feeding programme in place; (b) to use school gardens to stimulate local farm production; and (c) to promote healthy life styles (Buhl 2012). All this calls for participation of all the role players. In tandem with this the organisation, the Partici- pate group’s document (2013) argues that participation in development interventions are crucial in sustainable development. This group postulates: Sustainable change happens when people living in poverty acquire the tools and knowl- edge to participate actively and effectively in development processes. This may mean contrib- uting their specific local knowledge, their un- derstanding of the opportunities and challenges that local customs and beliefs present for so- cial change or it may mean challenging social and institutional injustice and demanding greater state accountability and access to pub- lic services. The project in this investigation was also propelled by commitment of both learners and teachers. Later, the community saw the project’s meaning and subscribed to the idea. The project became more than just a self-help project; it © Kamla-Raj 2013 J Agri Sci, 4(1): 39-47 (2013)