In Houègbo, Colli, Sékou, Togbota-Agué, and across the municipality of Toffo, five schools in Benin spent October 2025 to June 2026 living through Phase 2 of the “Acting for Nature Conservation” project. Led by the Réseau des Jeunes Solidaires pour la Protection de l’Environnement (RJSPE-ONG), with support from Youth Conservation, the Fondation Audemars-Watkins, and Play for Nature, this report closes the loop: RJSPE-ONG is the tenth and final partner NGO to submit its Phase 2 results.
RJSPE-ONG: The Tenth and Final NGO Working with Tomorrow’s Eco-Citizens
Based in Houègbo, in the municipality of Toffo, RJSPE-ONG has spent several years mobilizing Beninese youth around environmental protection, reforestation, and ecological farming. For Phase 2, the organization renewed its partnership with four schools from Phase 1 and introduced one change: CEG Toffo, sidelined by administrative constraints, was replaced by the Togbota-Agué Public Primary School (EPP) — giving RJSPE-ONG a chance to test its approach with a different type of school after two phases focused on secondary education.
CEG Houègbo: From Waste Sorting to a 2,500-Seedling Nursery
With 2,020 students, CEG Houègbo is the largest school in RJSPE’s network. More than 300 students took part in an environmental education day focused on plastic waste, followed by a major clean-up operation across the school grounds. The CPN Club (“Connaître et Protéger la Nature” — Know and Protect Nature) then took the lead on two fronts: a teaching garden growing lettuce, carrots, and amaranth, and a nursery of 2,500 seedlings — mostly Gmelina arborea, chosen for its fast growth. Some were planted on school grounds for National Tree Day; the rest were distributed to students and volunteer teachers to continue reforestation at home.
CEG Colli: A CPN Club Restoring the Zoundjakimè Forest
At CEG Colli, one of the strongest-performing schools in the network, Phase 1’s gains had already taken firm root: waste management and cleanliness are now part of everyday school life. Building on that foundation, 350 students helped produce more than 3,000 Gmelina arborea seedlings. Some were used in a reforestation campaign in the Zoundjakimè forest, a heavily degraded area identified as a restoration priority; the rest were distributed to teachers and CPN Club members to extend the effort beyond the school, into their own villages.
LAMS: Turning Organic Waste into an Agricultural Resource
At the Lycée Agricole Médji de Sékou (LAMS), a technical school with 1,500 students training for careers in agriculture, 200 CPN Club members set up a waste-sorting system and trained in composting — from collecting biodegradable waste through to monitoring the compost as it matured. The finished compost now fertilizes the school’s own nurseries, teaching gardens, and demonstration plots — a virtuous loop particularly well suited to a school where agroecology is already part of the curriculum.
EPP Togbota-Agué: Protecting the Habitat of the Red-Bellied Guenon
New to RJSPE’s network, the Togbota-Agué Public Primary School enrolled all 305 of its students in a newly formed CPN Club. The school sits next to two forest patches home to the red-bellied guenon, a primate endemic to Benin and southwest Nigeria whose habitat is steadily deteriorating. After sessions on local biodiversity, students produced 500 forest seedlings and planted them directly within these forest patches — a concrete way of turning these children into the first guardians of a species they’d just come to know.
Mine d’Or de Dieu School Complex: A Gateway to Green Entrepreneurship
At this private school in Houègbo, 200 of roughly 400 students attended training sessions on sustainable plant and animal production. Complementary hands-on workshops, held on weekends at RJSPE-ONG’s headquarters, introduced volunteer students to forest-seedling production, rabbit farming, and snail farming (heliciculture) — a first concrete window into environment- and agriculture-related careers, designed as a stepping stone toward green entrepreneurship.
Phase 2 by the Numbers: RJSPE-ONG’s Cumulative Impact
In total, Phase 2 directly mobilized 1,355 students across the five schools, with a ripple effect estimated at over 4,000 students indirectly sensitized within those same schools. 50 supervising teachers were trained, ten per school. School nurseries produced more than 6,000 forest seedlings, planted in schoolyards, in the Zoundjakimè forest, and in the Togbota-Agué forest patches, or distributed for individual reforestation. On social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), project posts reached over 3,000 people. Combining all these channels, RJSPE-ONG estimates it sensitized more than 7,000 people over the course of this phase.
Field Challenges, Local Solutions
The project’s own success created a challenge of its own: at several schools, participation far exceeded initial projections, prompting RJSPE-ONG to begin recruiting volunteers to strengthen its field teams. At EPP Togbota-Agué, local authorities first wanted guarantees that the activities would be sustained before authorizing certain hands-on work — a dialogue that helped build the trust needed going forward. At the Mine d’Or de Dieu complex, new classrooms built on the space previously used for hands-on activities forced workshops to move to RJSPE-ONG’s headquarters, reducing turnout among some students. At LAMS, new training programs tightened the school calendar, pushing some recycling activities to the second semester.
From Phase 1 to Phase 2: A Stronger Momentum
Compared to Phase 1, CPN Clubs proved more self-sufficient, and results grew more ambitious: over 6,000 seedlings produced, 50 teachers trained, and clearer ownership of good practices among teaching staff. That growth also surfaced new needs — more equipment, more supervisory capacity, and tighter coordination of the calendar across five schools — lessons RJSPE-ONG plans to build into the project’s next stage.
Continue the Journey with Youth Conservation
In one sentence, RJSPE-ONG sums up what the project brought to its organization: strengthened credibility and visibility as a reference actor in environmental education and youth engagement in Benin. Five schools, five stories, one shared momentum — a generation of young people in Benin learning to protect their environment by doing it themselves. To explore Youth Conservation’s free resources and follow the project’s next steps, visit youth-conservation.org.
If you want to know more about this NGO, you can directly contact them via Facebook.
