CART South Africa
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 demonstrates all the technologies and teaches all the skills required to sustain itself using local resources and without government help. These range from food production, to water usage, to waste management.
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.
Displays
Building Yard
CART developed a method of building strong steady houses, unlike the existing ones in the village. They designed a hand-operated mechanical press to make bricks out of clay dug out from nearby ground. These are used to build the walls, and wood from the local forest and grass are used to build and thatch the roof.
Permaculture Gardens
These gardens, used to grow crops not only provide the food used within the centre. They also provide a template for which crops to grow, when, how to maintain the soil, etc. to make full use of the climate and ground in the area. Rather than simply growing crops once a year due to the droughts, principles of permaculture are used to grow a variety crops throughout the year. Women from the local community have also successfully begun to use the skills introduced here and build their own gardens.
Nutrition Kitchen
Here it is demonstrated how people can use the crops grown in the gardens are used for provide a nutritious diet. Other than education about health and diet, skills are taught such as how to clean crops and preserve surplus food through drying, bottling, smoking, etc. A group of local women started a business together with the CART, which bottles food and sells it for some extra
Waste Management
CART did research on what would be the best method of waste management for a village such as Sicambeni. Ultimately, they decided a bio-digester was the solution. Conventional bio-digesters are extremely expensive, so they designed a new, cheap one, which could be constructed from locally available materials.
As the waste decomposes here, it releases methane gas, which is captured and used for cooking. Then solids are separated out from the liquids and used as fertilizer. The remaining blackwater, is mixed with greywater collected, treated and used for irrigation or collected in the local dam.
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.
