Humanitarian and Development
Place
Bahu, Moldova
Sponsor
Christian Arnould
Grant
43 000 € to the Selection Committee at 2010/01/26
Project leader
Alliance Française de Moldavie
France is extremely popular in Moldavia. And the Veolia Foundation is very active there. For several years, its teams have worked alongside Unicef and the Alliance Française on various projects in the capital, Chisinau, and also in the rest of the country.
The latest projects are located in the region of Codrii and its forests. There, a hundred kilometers from the capital, is the commune of Bahu, spread out on three hills overlooking two lakes. The problem is that the erosion of the hillsides is steadily increasing the number of landslides, and the school is threatened.
The students, accompanied by the educational team, managed to persuade the elected officials of their commune that only a reforestation that created a forest screen would be capable of consolidating the soil and preventing the proliferation of mud in the lakes.
A first reforestation project is therefore poised for implementation, backed by the Veolia Foundation as part of an outreach holiday program for the children of the employees of Veolia Eau.
Warm comfort and a theater created for the children
To supplement this first action, the Veolia Foundation is supporting the national projects that it deploys with Unicef Moldavia. These include a program called "Schools that are Friendly to Children", aimed to reduce absenteeism in the schools.
To welcome the students - and give them a "taste" for school - a clean and functional environment is often beneficial. It so happens that the school, which has 96 students, is very badly insulated, the wooden windows are obsolete, and the same can be said of the heating system. New PVC windows, tougher and better insulated, will therefore be installed, together with new gas-fired heating installations.
The latest project in partnership with the Alliance Française, at Chisinau, is the renovation of the new premises acquired by the Alliance Française adjoining the Ginta Latina Theater, where artistic and educational activities will be organized, particularly for the children of families in difficulty. The program drawn up should help welcome a hundred children per quarter in a dedicated venue, whose rooms and sanitary blocks have been renovated. On the whole, these initiatives, supported by a deeply involved population, will substantially improve the everyday life of many, many children.