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The Importance of Proper Waste Disposal to Improve the Quality of Health 
On 27th September 2003, Yonge Nawe in collaboration with a group of medical students from the University of Natal hosted an environmental clean up campaign for the communities of Emafini, Mangozeni and Sithomo within the Malkerns area. Other important players included the Malkerns Environmental Health Office and local schools. The theme for the campaign was "The Importance of Proper Waste Disposal To Improve The Quality Of Health By Decreasing Breeding Areas And Transmission Of Disease Causing Agents." This theme fits neatly with Yonge Nawe’s campaign on sustainable medical waste management. 

The event began at St. Andrews Primary School with speeches and various presentations followed by the actual cleaning of the said communities. The intervention highlighted the importance of understanding and caring for the environment and the need to remove conditions that harbour disease-causing agents such as mosquitoes. Yonge Nawe’s Communications and Research Coordinator explained the working link between Yonge Nawe and communities and spoke about the organisation’s ongoing medical waste management campaign. He further passed on tips proper waste management and commended the University of Natal Medical Student’s initiative in the exercise.

Thunzini Community Water Project
Yonge Nawe’s vision is to create a Swazi society where a healthy environment is valued, natural resources are used in a sustainable way and everyone enjoys a quality life. Working with communities is a key function in achieving this vision. In that strand, Yonge Nawe is currently engaged in facilitating the development of a safe water and sanitation project initiated by Thunzini community down at KaZombodze area, in the southern part of Swaziland. 

Sekusile Ethunzini Association is a community group that was formed to improve the living standards of its community through strategies to eradicate poverty and all its associated ills. The association aims at doing this through community based, self-help developmental interventions. In pursuing their vision, this association approached Yonge Nawe for assistance in improving a water project they begun. Thunzini water scheme project is aimed at developing the three natural water springs that serve the large community. The sources are located in Dwaleni, Lukhondvo and Thunzini. 

Facilitating a project of this nature requires technical assistance, which Yonge Nawe acquired from the Rural Water Services Department under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy. On August 16th and September 27th this team met with the community and visited the water sites for the proposed project. They held discussions to sensitise the community on the dangers of poor sanitation. Together, the Yonge Nawe team and Thunzini community were able to draw a needs assessment that confined the project to two phases. The first phase is an immediate intervention to rehabilitate and protect the open water sources by cleaning them, fencing the area around them and building concrete tanks to store the water safely. The second phase involves designing a long-term water scheme to sustain the community, enabling the 144 families to access water through taps in their houses. 

The Dwaleni water project was identified as the main project under the first phase due to its dire state. A population of over 230 people depends on this source and there is need for a water tank to provide clean and sufficient water to the community. At Lukhondvo, the community feared that water from their spring had dwindled because the concrete tank built to collect the water from the source no longer filled up and the community had a growing water shortage. However, having examined the pipes leading to the tank, the Yonge Nawe team discovered they were blocked thus limiting the water supply to the tank. They advised residents on how to clear the pipes in this way allowing for the determination of the spring’s water levels. The water source at Thunzini also requires cleaning and fencing.

The Yonge Nawe’s efforts in this project are aimed at ensuring that there is full community participation and ownership of the project. 

People Poverty and Natural Resources Management
The Natural Resource Management Coordinator attended a five- weeks course in Cape Town held from 18 August-18 September 2003. The course was organized by the International Union on Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in collaboration with the University of Western Cape. The main purpose of the course was to bridge the gap between natural resources management and the understanding of how social issues influence the way in which natural resources are managed. The course mainly aimed at:

• Empowering natural resources managers with knowledge necessary in handling social issues faced in the course of their work
• Linking policy into natural resources management.
• Linking natural resources management with people and poverty

The course content was organised into five modules, which ran for four weeks. The last week was fieldwork where participants were assigned to conduct research into the fishing industry at Ocean View. The research analysed the livelihood strategies for the Ocean View residents and the effects the new fishing policies have on the livelihoods of the artisanal fishers at Ocean View. 

The lessons learnt from the course can be summarised as:

• Better understanding of poverty requires an analysis of household livelihoods.
• Resource tenure will determine how people can combat poverty. This is crucial in natural resources management at a local level.
• Aborted devolution and limited decentralisation from national level to regional level without getting to the resource use level may lead to conflicts between people over natural resources and/ or conflicts between states over resources.
• Successful natural resources management programmes must take cognisance of existing policies and laws, local knowledge, multiple actors and the social relations of gender, age and power over resources. They also need to identify relative well being and the contribution of natural resources to the livelihood strategies of poor households and anticipate potential conflicts of interest.
• Conflict management involves identifying causes of conflicts over natural resources and selecting the appropriate methods of intervening in conflict situations. The challenges in conflict resolution in the area of natural resources management are:
• How to develop solutions to conflicts that are mutually acceptable
• How to engage in the problem solving process that ensures a safe environment
• How to facilitate effective communication
• How to stimulate creative needs of each parties interest, which is cooperative than competitive.