Changes

The Centre for Appropriate Rural Technology (CART) is a life skills centre in the rural village of Sicambeni in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It was developed by South African Volunteers and is managed by the local community. Its aim is to provide a fully self sustainable model for the approximately hundred households in the surrounding village to follow. Ultimately this will become a self sustainable village, to serve as a model for other nearby villages.

The Eastern Cape is one of the poorest regions of South Africa. Because of the poverty here, people often migrate to Townships on the edge of larger cities in the hope of finding jobs. Here they are often homeless, as these townships are overcrowded. For 15 years, South African Volunteers and others worked with these migrants to build homes and communities in the townships. Now a different approach is taken to irradicate poverty in the Eastern Cape. By making the villages self-sustainable, workers do not even need to migrate to townships.

CART is also building a community centre, where meetings and workshops can be held. Further it can be used as a workshop for mechanics, etc. They have also built a health centre for alternative therapy, yoga, health education, etc.

====Building Yard====

====Water Cycle====

Since the municipal water supply is highly unreliable, lack of drinking water is a big problem in the village. The centre, aside from having designed methods for recycling blackwater and greywater, focuses on rainwater harvesting. This is already practiced to a certain extent in households around the village. In addition CART has begun to build simple dams around the village, which are used to collect water. This water can directly be used for irrigation. If needed for drinking water, it is filtered through the slow sand filter at the centre.