COMMUNITY SUSTAINABILITY GLOBAL
January 2019
I conceived the idea for this project, “Community Sustainability Global” (CSG), as part of my duties as a registered Director of Holistic Sustainability Network International (registration number in Canada: 998247-7), a non-state organization focusing on “holistic sustainability.” Some colleagues and I founded the organization at Memorial University, but it now has student branches at the University of Toronto and Bangladesh. As a founding member and a First Director, I have been involved in designing and implementing many initiatives, including conferences, public consultation, training, and publications. I wanted to expand the network’s activities to Africa, so I partnered with another NGO that appointed me as a member of its board of directors, Human Dignity Foundation, to shape the project idea and pool resources together. Our driving theme is that sustainability, especially climate change mitigation, cannot happen without socio-economic sustainability in poor communities, so the project approaches sustainability holistically to contribute to international and national sustainability targets. We employ a “give and take” strategy: we give community members a less degrading economic skill to make them desist from an unsustainable way of life. This is a reasonable approach to sustainability in poor communities. The 2014 and 2018 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement endorse the approach under the “Sustainable Development” strategy.
We started implementing the first phase of the project in Nigeria, but we plan to expand to other poor places outside Africa, including indigenous communities in the Americas. With the funds from the NGOs, I recruited a local startup, Adireseyi Enterprises Company (Nigerian registration number: 2821379), to train community members how to make tie-dye (redesigning and reusing fabrics) and teach them to cut back on unsustainable practices (e.g. logging and overfishing). The project is still young, so we have much to do. Learn more on the project site below:
