The NGO OSI offers citizens of all ages, and of all origins, the opportunity to participate in real research projects serving sustainable development in more and more countries around the world.
- This allows them to make a contribution to the edifice of knowledge by actually advancing scientific research.
- This allows them to help make this world a better, more sustainable, more connected to nature, and respectful of our planet,
- This allows them to learn, to understand, to enrich their knowledge, not at school, but through practice, through experimentation, by devoting themselves to concrete useful projects.
- It teaches them to be an actor and not just a spectator
- This makes them aware of the issues or problems they might have gone through.
- It unites them, proves them through experience that the collective is much more powerful and constructive than a simple sum of individuals.
- It shows them that traveling and meeting others leads to tolerance which is none other than one of the greatest strengths our world needs.
Many people living in the DRC have expressed, in recent years, an interest in the projects carried by OSI, and have asked us about the possibility of creating a local group of the NGO OSI in their country. Many are the promoters of exciting, innovative, original, inspiring, useful or even necessary projects, lacking only the means that would allow them to make them a reality. This year, therefore, we have decided to support them in this great adventure, and of course to support them until the group operates in a reliable, sustainable and autonomous way!
The first step to initiate the process of creating the local group in the DRC is to allow a small group of people from the local team to come and participate in the ST1-MONDE 4-day training in Project Pedagogy Applied to Participatory Research dedicated to Education and the Resolution of Sustainable Development Goals which takes place each year in March in Paris, France, followed by training for the professions of program managers (“Peer-to-Peer NGOs for SDGs” training) which takes place every year in April at the UN in Switzerland.
- THE ST1 TRAINING will allow them to Become competent & autonomous in the field of Science Pedagogy through the Project applied to Participatory Research for Sustainable Development, to understand the functioning of the NGO OSI, to Size a Participatory Science project, Optimize their practices and knowledge in science education
- THE PEER-TO-PEER TRAINING NGOs FOR SDGs will allow them to master the functioning of OSI, the functioning of its mandate within OSI. It will give them the Tools to effectively and fully carry out a mandate within OSI, give them the necessary elements to enable them to collectively lead the local OSI group. At the end of this seminar, the representatives will be competent, capable, and autonomous, and should be able to act as internal guarantors of the fundamental rules of Organization of the NGO OSI.
12,000 euros would allow 6 people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to make the return trip between their country and Europe in March 2021, and to provide during this 3-week period for their needs in a country usually so little accessible due to economic inequalities between the 2 continents. Allowing them to make this trip means allowing the entire local group to benefit from high-level skills and finally be able to initiate the projects in which they wish to get involved upon their return, while being able to benefit from the unfailing support of the OSI team, of which they will then be part!
To name just a few that are currently being considered:
- A participatory research project, involving local city dwellers, aimed at contributing to more sustainable urban planning in Kinshasa, the DRC capital, at first, then in other urban areas of the country thereafter: This project would start with a inventory of the current urban situation, then by monitoring this situation in time and space, to then contribute to concrete progress in consultation with local populations, such as the rehabilitation of green spaces, the protection biodiversity, the reintroduction and conservation of plant and animal species, the food and energy empowerment of certain neighborhoods, with the ambition of achieving real collaboration with public authorities to lead to much more sustainable urban planning projects.
- Leadership and personal development training courses by doing, in order to consolidate the confidence, ambitions and initiatives of the decision-makers and leaders of tomorrow.
- A participatory research project in the east of the country, with the objective of successfully preserving the natural populations of surviving gorillas as best they can to various environmental and human pressures, and with the long-term ambition of contributing to major legislative advances in terms of the Law of Nature in the DRC.
- A project to study bonobo populations in western DRC in order to better understand this animal species and in particular to harmonize human-Bonobo relationships.
- A Science & Technology Club in the capital of Kinshasa, and in particular to contribute in this way to the empowerment of Congolese women.
This project to create the local group OSI-RDC will therefore be a long adventure strewn with stages. The first being to succeed in allowing a small delegation of people from the founding team of the OSI-RDC group being created to come and participate in the two trainings mentioned above.
Depending on the amount that this crowdfunding will make it possible to obtain, a different number of people may come to Europe for these trainings!
- 2,00 euros would allow one person to come and participate in these two training courses,
- 4,000 euros would allow two people to come and participate in these two trainings,
- 6,000 euros would allow three people to come and participate in these two trainings,
- 8,000 euros would allow four people to come and participate in these two training courses,
- 10,000 euros would allow five people to come and participate in these two training courses,
- 12,000 euros would allow six people to come and participate in these two trainings.
Every donation counts. The success and realization of this project depends on all of us.