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Abstract: Faith based institutions have the authority and ability to address several issues and being accepted and acted upon by the
people of different beliefs, especially by linking with the people’s respective faiths. This could be fully utilized in addressing
environmental issues, which is one of the most currently debatable global concerns. Given the environmental degradation challenges
facing Kilimanjaro region, the Northern Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania started an intervention on tree
planting by involving youth enrolled in confirmation classes as a way of promoting environmental conservation behaviour among
youths. Since the tree planting programme operate within the community, this study therefore was conducted to explore the way the
community perceive this programme, which will determine their participation therein, and success of the programme. A cross-sectional
research design was adopted and a random sample of 100 households that had registered their children for confirmation classes in
different years from 2003 to 2015 were involved. A Structured questionnaire with Likert scale was used to capture perceptions of
households complimented by Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews. The descriptive and content analysis was
adopted. The findings revealed that about 85% of the households had positive perception about the innovative approach adopted by the
church. Furthermore, the community members see the programme as part of their household responsibilities and a good approach
through which the nature can regain its lost form and provide to them what had been lost. The findings confirm the argument under the
theory of self-determination of environmental behavior since despite being the church intervention people perform a tree planting
behaviour for their own sake and to gain positive results. In this case, youths got involved in the program so as to graduate from
confirmation training while avoiding the negative outcomes that is failure to be confirmed. |
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