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.