Cape Town’s Environmental Resource Management Department (ERMD) and various partners joined forces to revamp the Gege Crèche in Langa using green design principles.
The City partnered with Stephen Lamb of Touching the Earth Lightly (TEL), artist Andrew Lord, the Handspring Puppet Company and the Ackerman Pick n Pay Foundation to design and install a safer, insulated crèche structure and food garden.
On Friday 4 October the City hosts an event to celebrate the improvements to the crèche and to thank all those involved.
“As a Caring City, we are very proud to have played a part in this initiative. It’s a win-win situation, where the children and caregivers have benefited by an improvement in their quality of life and well-being, and it has been achieved in an environmentally friendly way,” said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Economic, Environmental and Spatial Planning, Councillor Garreth Bloor.
The improved crèche structure was pre-built off site and easily assembled at its new home in minimal time, using the simplest of assembly skills. It is raised off the ground, so as to be above the groundwater flood line in winter rainfall months.
With a generous funding allocation from the Ackerman Pick n Pay Foundation, TEL installed a vertical food garden on the sun-facing sides of the crèche, following consultation with the principal about the types of food needed and currently cooked by the crèche staff. The caregivers also received two Wonderbags that will be used in the preparation of food for the children in an energy efficient way (the Wonderbag is a non-electric heat retention cooker that allows food that has been brought to the boil on a stove fire to continue cooking for hours after it has been removed from the fuel source).
“This is particularly exciting as the structure now contributes in a direct way to real food security and the nutrition of those who occupy it,” said Stephen Lamb of TEL.
For more information on the vertical food garden, please watch
