Pan African Conservation Education Programme (PACE)
Siren Conservation Education, UK & Africa, 2006.
These cartoons for Siren's PACE programme implemented across several African nations became part of a collaborative package including a children's book with artwork by Tanzanian artist Godfrey Semwaiko, as well as a series of films featuring sustainable development projects in Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and Zambia.
Note the sparse use of colour. This experiment enabled me to reduce my effort to accommodate a limited budget, and also achieve an interesting visual effect that I was later to use again in other projects.
"Everyone was delighted with the cartoons!" - Nancy Gladstone, Siren Conservation Education
The government of Ghana is concerned about the impact of plastic waste on tourism.
Communities in South Africa's townships ingeniously recycle garbage into tourist souvenirs.
Dried elephant dung can be made into paper. Everybody is happy about this, except dung beetles of course.
Marauding elephants can be dissuaded from raiding crops by planting chillies. Elephants don't think much of this idea.
Live trees, such as this Baobab, provide a vital service: shade, among other things.
An interesting energy alternative to fossil fuels is biogas.
With a little investment and training, permaculture is a viable option for daily subsistence.
Tyre gardens - shown here behind the fence - allow people to grow their own vegetables even in densely populated urban environments. Better than shopping, any day...
Invasive water hyacinth - a floating weed - is a grave problem for the health of wetlands upon which millions of people depend, as is the case for Lake Victoria for example.
Another cartoon about using elephant dung to make paper. If trees could talk I'm sure this is what they would be saying...
Farmers in many parts of Africa have to put up with stampeding elephants trampling and eating their crops, thieving baboons after their corn and marauding leopards ready to pounce on their livestock. Such problems are known as Human-Wildlife Conflict.
Siren also asked me to create a simple comic strip illustrating a case study of solid waste management in Sri Lanka. I'm not sure why it was part of the PACE programme, but many similar initiatives are applied in Africa. Click to see the images.