You’re Invited!

Join The EXPEDITION Project and experience the incredible diversity of South Africa while helping to create a window on sustainable development in the nation. 

We need young, adventurous media volunteers to document a journey that will reveal the challenges and celebrate the successes of sustainable development in South Africa. Besides capturing the expedition with video, photography and stories, we also need our volunteers to help with surveys and interviews in the communities we will be visiting. 

What to Expect

You will be travelling by road with a team leader and two other volunteers. We have tried to keep the daily drive time to under two hours on average, but even on exceptional cases we will aim not be on the road for more than four hours on any given day. The course that we have plotted is off the beaten track, but there is no serious bush-whacking involved. The areas we travel through are safe and malaria-free. 

Some of our research activities will include interviewing livestock farmers for CapeNature about predator control and doing surveys for a Maternal Health project in collaboration with local and international research groups. We will also be visiting community projects that we identified on our 2012 expedition, so you can look forward to encountering many different cultures. Of course, we will also take time out to enjoy nature and explore attractions like prehistoric rock paintings and animal sanctuaries. Our mission is a serious one, but we believe that fun makes work worthwhile.

We have a clear creative concept for the media we’d like to produce, but it is flexible enough for individual expression and your own fresh ideas.

What is The EXPEDITION Project?

The EXPEDITION Project aims to identify significant social and environmental challenges in South Africa in order to find the best solutions to overcome those challenges. Practically, this means determining the root causes of the issues through hands-on assessments and face-to-face interviews. It also involves noting the successes that communities have achieved, which may be replicated elsewhere or used to inspire and encourage other groups. The EXPEDITION Project connects community projects and enterprises with each other and promotes them through its own media channels. All of these goals are achieved through a series of sustainable annual journeys that are publicised in the media and supported by government and private enterprise.

In its foundation year (2012), The EXPEDITION Project’s main aim was to identify the most pressing issues and the areas of greatest need. It also served as a road test of the project itself, bringing to light the practical and logistical challenges it would need to overcome in order to be effective and sustainable. The 2012 journey ran along the periphery of South Africa – staying off the beaten track allowed it to visit remote communities that are easily neglected and cut off from the resources available in bigger centres.

While it will mostly stay off the beaten track in 2013, The EXPEDITION Project will expand its scope by including communities in South Africa’s interior, as well as a few more well known areas and towns in order to gather a varied annual assessment. It will also increase its effectiveness by implementing the lessons learnt in 2012. For example, a bigger team will allow The EXPEDITION Project to drill down into the practical needs it encounters, make an inventory of the resources required and engage suppliers or sponsors to meet those needs.