New phase for our Africa programme

As ARC regretfully announces that our funding for the Africa programme has come to an end, we pay tribute to the outstanding achievements of our faith partners. This work is moving into a new phase, led by our faith partners in Africa, and we will continue updating the Faiths for Green Africa website.

It has been many years since ARC started working in Africa in the mid 1990s. In 2012, we supported 27 faith groups from 11 sub-Saharan African countries to launch their long-term environmental plans.

In 2013, we launched the first Faith-based Education for Sustainable Development Teacher's Toolkit, and in 2014 we published the first Islamic Farming conservation agriculture toolkit. Then, in October 2014, we invited more than 90 faith leaders from across the continent to gather in Uganda to share best practices around faith-based sustainable land management and agriculture.

These events, and the countless activities in between, have been enormously successful. We applaud you for the work you are doing and will continue to do. Our aim has always been build self-reliance, not dependency. We hope this has been the case and believe you, our partners, will go on to greater achievements than before.

As you may know, this work has been mainly dependent on funding from Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately this has not been renewed and we have not succeeded in finding alternative sources of funding. As a result, ARC's trustees have reluctantly taken the decision to close ARC's involvement in the Africa programme. They also expressed their 'surprise, disappointment and concern' that the funding had not been renewed.

We know this will come as a shock to some of you, as indeed it has to the Africa team (Alison, Susie, Mary, Sue and Sam). Our last day at ARC will be February 28.

However, we know that this work will continue with the faith environmental networks: UFNEA, the Uganda Faiths Network on Environment Action; KINEA, the Kenya Interfaith Network on Environmental Action; NEFEAT, Network of Faiths on Environmental Action in Tanzania and CYNESA, the Catholic Youth Network for Environmental Sustainability in Africa, the Mother Earth Network, as well as RELBONET, the Religious Bodies Network on Climate Change, in Ghana and SAFCEI, the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute.

We are sure that KOEE will also take this work forward as well as A Rocha and our other loyal partners. We are very proud of, and impressed by, all you have achieved and of having played a small part in some of those achievements.

We would like to express our gratitude to all of you for the privilege of working together and the great job of seeing positive change in the many communities we have encountered. We know that this important work of caring for God's creation will continue through your efforts and those of others.

We applaud you, the faith groups, for the work you are doing and will continue to do.

– ARC Africa team

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