Amalumbo Community Trust (ACT) endeavors to promote a strong and self-sustaining community that is able to overcome the burdens and challenges of poverty, illiteracy, disease, unemployment and underdevelopment so as to engage individuals in their own development and that of their community. The CC was formed by people from Muslim, Christian and African traditional communities. The eastern part of Zambia has a lot of Muslims and Muslim institutions because that is where one of the oldest mosques is, built around 1957. The issue of interfaith comes in as well as environmental sustainability as part of a shared human responsibility towards nature. Zambia is a country plagued by land degradation as a result of unsustainable farming practices such as shifting cultivation, continuous mono-cropping and over-grazing. Land degradation is severe in the eastern province of Zambia and has resulted in low land productivity, sudden drops in crop yields and animal productivity, and animal diseases. Given that an overwhelming majority of the rural population depends on agriculture, the effect of land degradation is deepening rural poverty. ACT is visionary, active, experienced and deeply passionate about finding sustainable solutions for these challenges facing African nations, and they are able to connect the issue of poverty with the resulting deforestation so they truly have an understanding of where the core needs are. Rev Dennis Milanzi, primary contact of this CC, wrote recently in a newspaper article, “My challenge is that many communities still think that tree planting is the responsibility of government, and they continue to harvest tree products without planting any trees.”
