VULA YOUTH DEVELOPMENT

Vula Youth Development, a non-profit entity registered in South Africa, runs peer education programs, trainings, and workshops aimed at building confidence, capacity, creativity, life, and leadership skills among youth in rural and less advantaged communities. This is achieved through the use of performing arts, including drama, dance, and music, to create safe spaces and facilitate constructive and creative dialogue among youth. The focus encompasses a wide range of life-skills topics, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence, peer pressure, HIV/AIDS, TB, and issues of racism, sexism, xenophobia, as well as environmental education, including climate change. By using performing arts to promote indigenous culture and heritage, Vula Youth Development ensures that youth connect with each other and with the issues at a personal level. Together with Alliance for Collaboration on Climate and Earth System Science (ACCESS) Vula spearheads “The Habitable Planet Workshop (HPW) Schools Programme”, a programme for (earth systems) science and climate change in rural and low-income area high schools. We do this from a uniquely South African Perspective: where addressing Climate Change is as important as, addressing inequalities of the past, inclusivity, employability and job creation for the youth, inspiring national cohesion and pride, indigenous knowledge, as well as celebrating and conserving the South African environmental heritage. Science clubs, holiday programmes, careers’ days, field trips, and other activities at underprivileged schools nationwide are facilitated and run by groups of postgraduate peer educators. These peer educators, who are alumni of the sister student programme the Habitable Planet Student Workshop (hosted by ACCESS), are often from the same area and background as the learners.