Ever since arriving in Malawi nearly three years ago, I was struck by the haunting beauty of this small, landlocked country in a forgotten corner of Africa. The majesty of the baobab trees ‘the Trees of Life’, the bursts of purple from the jacaranda trees, and the wide, open skies.
At the same time, this beauty, and the future development of Malawi, is under threat — from climate change, growing waste, polluted rivers in the cities, and great swathes of bare hills, robbed of their trees to feed the growing need for energy and firewood.
As UNDP we are supporting the Government with many of these challenges and in making development more sustainable — with a shift to solar energy mini-grids, supporting a Government ban on single use plastics and helping farmers adapt to the effects of a changing climate.
Yet, somehow, in our focus of support to the Government, we had forgotten ourselves to walk the talk. In our office, it was usual to print single-sided, use plastic water bottles, and turn on the diesel burning generator. We realized that there was a lot of work to be done to green our own operations …. and we rolled up our sleeves.
It is almost a year since we started in earnest and we now have an office recycling scheme, a ban on single use plastics at all office events, and a bike park with bikes to use for meetings close by.
So… in our quest to Green the Blue in Malawi — what have we learned so far?
Education, education, education: not everyone had the same type of information and what was obvious to someone had not even occurred to the next person. When UNDP globally announced the Greening Moonshot and the Greening the Blue course became mandatory, it went a long way to equip us all with the necessary information and brought everyone on the same page. It didn’t stop the recycling scheme breaking down almost as soon as it had started — which points to the need for us to plan more regular training sessions!
Even greening is better locally owned: UNDP’s approach to development is that it is people-centered, and our greening moonshot could be no different. Local solutions need local leaders: cue our dynamo new Young Professional who now leads the team and keeps us all on our toes with the actions we have promised.
Going green can cost money: sometimes an upfront investment is needed to save money down the line — fortunately, with the end of the year, we found a small pocket of money in our operational budget that needed to be spent…. And our new bikes have now arrived!
Keep the focus on the things that people care about: we can’t expect everyone working in the office to care about the costs of our generator fuel, but everyone cares about the noise the generator makes when it is running. Therein lies the key to building consensus on going solar.
We still have a long way to go. More of us are synchronizing our different schedules to travel in one vehicle, but there are still the more protocol-minded who find it strange to share a car with the boss. When we were discussing the idea of the bike park — our brilliant communications officer, exclaimed "but I went to college to be able to afford to buy a car!" We are starting with an office carpooling system, but with the increasing traffic jams in Lilongwe, perhaps it won’t be long until biking to work becomes more appealing…
Once we have properly greened the blue, the plan is to go wider and partner with others, in development, the private sector and Government. Malawi has one of the highest rates of deforestation in Southern Africa and is on the frontline of climate change — as we saw when Cyclone Idai hit earlier this year. Policy and programmes needs to change, but so does our behaviour.
Follow our journey to green the entire ‘Warm heart of Africa’ on www.mw.undp.org
