Living in a poor country with one of the worst doctor-patient ratios in the world - about one for every 24,000 people - it's perhaps no surprise that many Ugandans are tempted by alternative remedies, even though there's often little evidence to support the claims made about their efficacy in treating or preventing disease. But the phenomenon does beg many questions, not least of which are who is really benefiting from the sale of these products and how exactly are they marketed?

We'd heard reports about one particularly controversial business, a complex multi-level marketing scheme run in Uganda under the aegis of a Chinese company called Tiens, which produces food supplements.

Its products, we'd been told, were being inappropriately sold as medications - in some cases for very serious diseases. We had also heard disturbing claims that its sales representatives, or "distributors" as they are known, were being invited to invest large sums of money in Tiens products, when in reality there was little chance of most of them ever making the kind of dazzling returns that the company promised.

So we sent a filmmaking team and Ugandan reporter Halima Athumani to investigate further.

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The way we learn and share experiences is changing. INBAR’s themed online webinar series brings bamboo and rattan experts from all over the world together to educate, inspire and discuss, without the need for travel.

This is session 2 of the series 'Bamboo: A Very Sustainable Construction Material'. These webinar sessions aim to build greater awareness about bamboo’s potential to alleviate the world’s acute housing crisis, as a low-cost form of construction and as part of the development of zero-emission, ‘green’ cities.

Speaker: Kent Harries, Professor of the University of Pittsburgh

Topic: Full-culm bamboo as a full-fledged engineering material

Speaker: Andry Widyowijatnoko, Architect and Lecturer at Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia

Topic: From traditional to engineered to substitutive bamboo construction

Speaker: Sebastian Kaminski, Senior Structural Engineer of Arup

Topic: Designing durable bamboo structures: how to protect against rot and insect attack

The International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation, or INBAR, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to promoting the use of bamboo and rattan for inclusive, green development. We research and strengthen the global knowledge base for bamboo and rattan and raise awareness of their use for:

♣Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation
♣Land Restoration
♣Poverty Alleviation
♣South-South Cooperation
♣Sustainable, Affordable Construction
♣Accessible, Green Energy.

INBAR Official:

www.inbar.int
www.twitter.com/INBARofficial/
www.twitter.com/INBARlac/
www.twitter.com/INBARWaro/
www.facebook.com/INBARofficial/
www.facebook.com/INBARlac/
www.facebook.com/INBARWARO/

Follow our Youtube channel for practical tips for growing, processing and marketing bamboo and rattan products as well as interviews, speeches and more from our work around the world.

Greening Deserts is an economical, educational, cultural, social, scientific and sustainable project to reduce desertification and global warming. http://www.greening-deserts.com

Greening Deserts sustainable agriculture and greenhouse farming projects using classical greening or gardening methods but also new and alternative techniques like hydroponics, permaculture and vermaculture.

Greening Deserts projects are for arid or dry, hot or cold regions. We offer also professional greening services and solutions for coastal, subtropical, cold and semi-arid areas nearby water sources like lakes, rivers, seas or oceans!

Download the official press releases and media package:
http://www.greeningdeserts.com..../greeningdeserts_med
Feel free to use and share the material.

The project is in development, non profit, NGO (at the moment) and needs any support in this stage! If you can’t spend money but want help a bit, you can share, like and comment, give constructive advises, recommendations or suggestions.

General information:

Greening Deserts or dry areas with sustainable irrigation and renewable energy. Using filtered ocean water, sharing systems overground and underground. Special desert plants can produce fast topsoil and create partwise shadows for plants around. Another great idea is to use bamboo water pipelines to reach dry areas or far regions. We have long time this idea now it is time to realise! We want to start everywhere it’s possible to get back topsoil, especially in dry countries like Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain, Lebanon, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, etc.

To accelerate the process professional greenhouses will be installed and newest sustainable cultivation techniques like permaculture will be used. The project starts primarily near coasts with building Greening Camps, a kind of farm with greenhouses and containers, tents or huts. We do not just want to build Greening Camps, parks and whole woods, we also doing scientific research and want to develop better irrigation and cultivation techniques in our lab and on site.

Greening Deserts projects are also good for refugee camps. Refugees can be integrated into the greening process, building greenhouses for food, medicine and forestation of parks and woods. They could create their own healthy environment and supply. We wrote detailed articles about this theme.

The fields of horticulture, agriculture and forestry play a special role in the Greening Deserts research projects of the greening camps and research camps, so these areas are not only researched and developed but also documented and mediated. On the basis of practical and theoretical work and examples, old and new possibilities for opencast mining and post-mining landscapes are presented, improved and further developed. The first set-up of the greening campaign in the opencast mine area of Leipzig (opencast mining desert), is to create a multi-layered garden and park with test fields for regional, domestic and country-specific plant species and special species from all over the world. In greenhouses, in addition to plant breeding (young plants, cuttings or seedlings), possible environmental and climatic conditions are also simulated, in separate areas, rooms or boxes.

As also described in other parts of the concept, the focus is on the research and optimization of different types, types of bodies, lighting and irrigation methods. The improvement of soil production, soil quality and plant growth is another important focus.

The processes (irrigation, light and nutrient distribution) can be further optimized through effective and economical energy and resource consumption. These are also tasks and objectives for the sustainable greening and management of all sorts of barren and dry areas or landscapes.

Since pioneer plants populate the landscape relatively quickly in most open-cast mining plants, thus loosening and ventilating the soils, it is easier to create new plantings such as garden plants, parks and mixed forests (mixed forests). This also results in further possibilities for future landscape design, such as, for example, experimental gardening, gardening, creative and artistic design of green areas and landscape parks.

Visit the official pages for more information. Support also other sustainable projects like Desert Rice Cultivation, Desert Bamboo Project und Green Ring Africa.

We can do much more greening services, also in cities, check our connected projects and contact us for more information or if you are really interested to work with us. Maybe you want to join our reseach team?

On March 28, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on NBC's Meet The Press to discuss his historic five-day march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
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One week after leading, King said that the demonstration was necessary not just to help push the Voting Rights Bill through, but to draw attention to the humiliating conditions in Alabama such as police brutality and racially-motivated murder.

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