Indigenous woman and a pygmy offering banana leaves for designing plant pockets at JEBK DRC

Mrs Angelina, an indigenous woman with a pygmy man from the village Buhini in South Kivu offering banana leaves to the Jardin Ethnobotanique Garden to design plant pockets. They also hold Two leaves of Musanga leo-errerae Hauman & Léonard (Family Urticaceae).

To ensure the soil protection and to contribute to its fertility, the Jardin Ethnobotanique Kivu promotes the utilization of biodegradable local plant material such the banana leaves to design plant pockets to support transplanting of young plants from the nursery. The sustainable plant pockets are designed at the Jardin Ethnobotanique Kivu by the volunteering team most including indigenous pygmy people and women (the most marginalized group) recently evicted from the National Parc Kahuzi Biega (PNKB), a protected area in the mining zone of this conflict zone. In the rural areas of the Kivu (DRC), banana leaves are often still utilized to design the roofs of traditional houses by indigenous and local communities of the Bashi, Bahavu and the Pygmies(Mbuti). Yet, due to the quick spreading urbanization of rural areas, these traditional ways of house building is.