Soil for Life (SFL), an NGO in Cape Town, South Africa, aims to significantly improve the nutritional and economic status of individuals and communities living in poverty in the Cape Town area. They do this by educating and training people to do low-input, organic food gardening using water wisely, and applying low-cost, environment-friendly technologies in order to maximize the production of vegetables, fruits and herbs.  SFL also runs training in other life skills.

Interns are required to support SFL to promote more energy-efficient, environment-friendly standards. For this they will teach in a culturally-sensitive way simple, energy-saving and other appropriate technologies that both SLF and people in the township can use. This will involve doing an assessment of the kinds of energy saving and other appropriate technologies useful in this area. Another project interns will be involved in is assisting in reducing SFL’s administrative red tape by streamlining their monitoring and evaluation process and creating a database. Piloting culturally sensitive monitoring and evaluation tools in the townships with SFL trainees and producing a report with the findings would be the major task of this project.

Experience working with or studying energy conservation and/or recycling technologies, engineering, building, environmental science and training are required. Further, an understanding of community-building processes and ways to effectively communicate with a diverse array of people from different cultural backgrounds is necessary. Interns require IT-knowlege as well as as skills in databasing, data capturing, research, monitoring and evaluation, and experience working in culturally-diverse environments for this project.

Interns will work with people from the Xhosa, Afrikaans and English speaking communities on a daily basis. Thereby they will have the opportunity to learn about South Africa’s multi-racial society.

The scheduled time for the internship is between August and October 2012. Training and seminars prior to the internship will be held in English. The tandem will be formed by a French participant and a German/Swiss participant.