Filming Wild

Category: thank you | Date: Apr 11 2008 | By: admin

Thank you for your generosity, in helping to support the work of the African Environmental Film Foundation. In line with our recent appeal, this week’s donations will be used to pay for prizes for the children participating in the Environmental Awareness Competition at Kenya’s Giraffe Center. Altogether, 150 winners and runners up will receive a copy of one of our educational DVDs about conservation, from a selection of 12 different films.

The following donations have been received in the past week:

Dana J $50

Susanna N $25

Anonymous 25$

Thank you very much. We hope to be able to attend the prize giving day ourselves (on 6th June), and photograph the kids receiving their DVD prizes… We’ll be sure to post some photos here.

Tags: 1202, 1206, 121, 1213, 1214, 122, 173, 176, 220, 46, 698

One response so far

Category: appeals | Date: Apr 03 2008 | By: admin

|

|

CHILDREN’S ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS AWARD

The Giraffe Center of the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife is a non-profit organization whose objectives are to educate the youth in Kenya on the importance of conserving wildlife and the environment. This year, the Giraffe Center celebrates 25 years in conservation education.

The Giraffe Center has long been one of our major distribution partners, using our educational films as teaching tools to great effect.

Each year, they show our educational films about diverse conservation and environmental issues to over 165,000 children and adults, as follows:

Organized School Trips:……………60,000 children per year
Underprivileged Children’s Groups:……..5,000 children per year
Teacher Training Programs:………………225 teachers per year
Domestic and International Tourists:………>100,000 visitors per year

As part of their education program, the Center organizes an annual National Environmental Awareness Competition, whereby children participate in essay writing, artwork and photography, giving them the opportunity to analyze the environmental issues affecting them on a daily basis, and to suggest possible solutions to problems.

This year’s competition theme is “Environmental Conservation Education”, culminating in a prize-giving day on 6th June 2008, to coincide with World Environmental Week.

The African Environmental Film Foundation has been asked to contribute 150 DVDs of our films as prizes for the participating students (many thousands of children will compete).

150 winners and runners-up from different categories and age groups, representing students from across Kenya, each going back home to their village with a copy of an educational film which their whole community will see, have the potential to spread the conservation message contained therein to every corner of the country.

Despite the cost of these DVD copies being relatively small, it is nonetheless an expenditure for which we have not budgeted. Therefore, if we are to be able to contribute the DVDs as prizes, we need to raise the money to produce the copies.

Please help if you can:

The cost of producing each DVD copy (which has to be done in UK as no high quality replication facilities exist yet in East Africa), including the cost of the cover and freight from UK to Kenya is $7.50.
Producing 150 DVD copies (incorporating a selection from our 12 available films) will cost a total of $1,125.

Donations can be made online here, or by check made out to the ‘African Environmental Film Foundation’ and sent to our Foundation offices in the USA, Kenya or UK. Please specify that your donation is for the Giraffe Center Award Partnership. Thank you.
For more information, you can download a copy of the Giraffe Center’s letter to us, requesting our participation in this initiative, you can visit the Giraffe Center website, and of course you can always contact me personally with any questions.

A heartfelt thank you for any help you can give…

150 DVDs of AEFF’s twelve educational films will constitute prizes…

Tags: 1202, 1206, 121, 1213, 1214, 122, 173, 176, 220, 46, 698

15 responses so far

Category: background information | Date: Mar 19 2008 | By: admin

The African Environmental Film Foundation (AEFF) is separately registered as a US non-profit organization and as a UK Charity, with its operational base in Kenya, East Africa. The Foundation has a bold vision for transforming the face of environmental education in Africa, primarily through the medium of educational films, supported by modern technology and communication methods.

Our aim is to significantly contribute to financial independence in Africa by increasing people’s awareness of conservation-based enterprises and environmentally sustainable ventures. Education is crucial for personal empowerment, resulting in local and national development. African people hunger for knowledge, but are starved of learning resources – especially those relevant and applicable to their own particular situation.

We believe that if people do not KNOW about their wildlife and natural resources, they cannot care about them. More to the point perhaps in Africa’s many poor rural and urban areas, even if people know that killing wildlife and over-exploiting their natural resources is wrong and harmful in the long term, if they do not know of any ALTERNATIVE methods to make a living without destroying the very resources they rely on in the long term, it is impossible for them to change their ways. Therefore, education is crucial, and we believe that film is one of the most powerful ways of imparting information in a memorable way, and also of sharing information between communities so that they can learn from each other.

Films made about Africa for Western television do not have much resonance in Africa itself; hence the reason for the birth of the African Environmental Film Foundation. Since its launch in 1998, AEFF has been producing and distributing educational films about environmental issues in Africa, for the people of Africa, in their own languages. These films are distributed free of charge and are seen by millions of people, predominantly in East Africa and increasingly further afield on the continent and internationally.

By making films exclusively about African issues, in multiple African dialects and languages, and by presenting the facts and working examples in a balanced and impartial way, AEFF enables people to make informed decisions about their own environment, and shows them ways to forge a way out of poverty without depleting the very natural resources on which they depend for a healthy and sustainable future in the long term.
In tandem, these same films allow people in Western countries to gain a true understanding of the real issues facing people in Africa, which could have long-lasting benefits for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

One of our distribution partners sets up the screen for a film showing in Maungu Town, rural Kenya.

As with many of our audiences, this one at Maungu consisted of eager kids as well as knowledge-hungry adults.

Tags: 1201, 1202, 1205, 121, 1213, 1214, 122, 1231, 173, 176, 46

4 responses so far