TCOE

The Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE) is a national collective of six NGOs that has facilitated the building of independent people’s organisations and leadership in 250 rural and peri-urban villages in the Western and Eastern Cape and Limpopo Provinces.  The communities featured in these photographs come from these villages. They face the consequences of landlessness on a daily basis. They battle to access basic services like water and healthcare and have only limited means to farm and create a livelihood from the land.

In the villages Community Development Committees and Forums are the main vehicles through which the aspirations and needs of the rural poor with whom TCOE work have been expressed. TCOE also strengthened and built farmers associations and women’s groups so that they can access, utilise and manage land for food security and livelihoods.  These groups have begun to explore alternatives to mainstream commercial agricultural methodologies that is less market dependent, not as reliant on expensive inputs, and that helps to restore soil quality.

In recent years the TCOE has hosted events such as the Peoples Tribunal on Landlessness, speak-outs on Local Government and service delivery and several community leadership conferences that provided space for rural people from different organisations to share ideas and voice their concerns.  Together with the National Land Committee, we also participated in the World Conference on Racism and the Week of the Landless at the WSSD as spaces for building a collective vision of another world without poverty.