World Wide Fund for Nature(WWF) Uganda has entered a partnership with Bunyoro Kingdom that will see them plant woodlots in schools around the kingdom.
This was announced on Wednesday during the commemoration of the 2024 Earth Hour held in Kagadi District .
The Bunyoro Kingdom Prime Minister, Andrew Kirungi Byakutaga Ateenyi welcomed the initiative that he said will go a long way in replenishing the green environment in the kingdom.
He noted that kingdom will work with its county chiefs to implement the program.
“The kingdom was the pioneer and continues to promote education with schools and educational institutions,”Byakutaaga said.
Agneta Winther, the Chief Operations Officer at WWF Uganda said the woodlot acres wills see trees cut down planted back.
“An average school in Uganda needs at least three trucks of firewood a week to meet the cooking energy needs. With over 22,500 primary schools and 2000 secondary schools alone, this puts our forest sector and the environment specifically under a big threat. We have therefore decided this year to use the Earth Hour to shed light on the really big crisis of deforestation we currently face in Uganda, one of the reasons being cooking fuel for school. So we use this opportunity to focus on this problem with the schools in Uganda that are consuming lots of wood for firewood,” she explained.
“We want to do this year is to ask the schools to plant at least one acre of woodlots for them to be self-sustainable in terms of fuel for cooking, but also to keep the environment in the school nice and clean and cold, so we can avoid ending up in a situation like in South Sudan where they had to close the schools because it was so hot.”
