The Chumbe Project aims at building environmental awareness in Zanzibar. Therefore, the Chumbe Education Program is a vital component that sponsors local school visits to the island, prepared through in-service teacher training workshops and the development of teaching aids.

As elsewhere in the region, school education in Zanzibar is based on rote learning of highly academic syllabi that have little relationship with the surrounding world. Though Zanzibar is a coral island, coral reef ecology is insufficiently covered in school syllabi. Formal education does not yet provide environmental information on marine issues, as revealed by an analysis of the syllabi of primary and secondary education (Riedmiller 1991, Riedmiller 1995).

Also extra-curricular activities, such as field excursions, are rarely organized. Very few children have a chance ever to visit coral reefs and coral-rag forests. This is also partly due to the fact that school children, and particularly girls, normally do not learn how to swim or snorkel.

More information on Chumbe's education program can be found from attached environmental education programme report June 2006 (PDF).

PLease also see the "Chumbe Island Wish list" (DOC).