Center for Peace and Conflict Mitigation (CEPCOM) in conjunction with Zenzero Associazione & Standard Manufacturing Limited on Monday commemorated the International Women’s Day 2021 by carrying out community service in areas of Zana, Makindye Ssabagabo, Wakiso District.
The three teams joined by a group of women and schools- Zana Parents School and Anna & Tonny Primary School went around Zana sweeping, cleaning trenches, picking garbage, plastics which they were disposing off.
The women who took part are staff of CEPCOM under women empowerment program where they participate in bottle collection for recycling to improve livelihood as they clean the environment.
Running under the theme, ‘Safe Environment: Women take the challenge’, the day cleaning exercise was aimed at challenging government and other responsible authorities to take on a shared collective social responsibility of ensuring that Ugandans have a clean and sustainable environment.
With women at the frontline as champions in environmental preservation and regeneration, Stephen Kuteesa, the Executive Director CEPCOM said they decided to join the the good cause to show the world that each person has a shared responsibility to protect and conserve the environment as they co-exist with it.
“The message of the day is rooted from the global theme of the event of celebrating and commemorating the International Women’s Day which is #choose to challenge and as CEPCOM alongside with the women, we came up with a theme ‘Safe environment: Women take the challenge’ And basically the message was women coming out to challenge the government, to challenge the municipal councils, cities, towns, youth, to challenge women themselves, to challenge the men and each one of us to take on the responsibility in a shared collective responsibility of ensuring that we have a sustainable environment,” Mr Kuteesa said.
“We degrade it and we forget the fact that we are cutting the branch of a tree on which we are seated. So we basically came out with a cleaning exercise drawing from the current situation whereby people have abandoned responsibilities about protecting the environment.People are irresponsible, they only enjoy taking for example the beverages like sodas, ice cream, the water in plastic bottles but they forget that they also need to dispose them properly. So after enjoying they just litter then anyhowly indiscriminately which later alone pile up, they become heaps and they end up in water channels thus in the long run it leads to flooding and diseases like cholera. The responsibility of us as individuals starts from that very point that we should be sensitized, that we should be aware of the need to conserve and regenerate our environment right from the grassroot.”
Mr Kuteesa further cautioned that before destroying the environment, people should first think what they are leaving behind for the future generation.
“By the end of the day this should be a challenge to all of us. Women are taking the lead that we should take the responsibility of ensuring that we have a clean and safe environment and as we think about the future generation to come. And you can not say that you care about the future when you don’t conserve the environment,” he asserted.
“And to have a safe environment, we should work collectively by creating a sustainable environment in a way that we co exist with it. So we did that cleaning exercise as an eye opener, as a challenge to each one of us and also as a reminder that it’s our role as individuals to have a clean and sustainable environment.”
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