Environmental education in the Rural Community of Ekovongo-Bié/Angola

Abstract

Ekovongo is a rural community whose population builds their experiences in a close relationship with the earth and other elements that inhabit nature. In recent decades Ekovongo has registered an accelerated degradation of the environment mainly caused by unregulated exploitation of forests, carried out by producers of charcoal, for their commercialization, whose effects are felt in the impoverishment of the soil, and therefore in low agricultural productivity. In the framework of the doctoral thesis on the theme: Education and Development in Ovimbundu Communities in Angola: Ethnographic Study of the Community of Ombala Ekovongo/Bié, still in progress at the University of Santiago de Compostela, were formulated among others the goals of preserving the local culture and the environment. This article aims, on the one hand, analyze the environmental problematic in their common aspects; on the other, to identify environmental problems that the community faces today and the traditional knowledge that guide the relationship between comunarios and other natural beings, as development factors, which in essence make up the social representations of Ekovongo people around the environmental problematic.