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ABOUT CAPE GREEN FOUNDATION

Cape Green Foundation was started in 2022 by two Dutchmen. Cees Koldijk is a theatre producer and musician. Ton van der Lee is a film producer and has extensive experience in Africa where he has built schools in remote rural areas with his foundation. He speaks fluent Portuguese, the official language of the Cape Verde islands.

We had both been visiting the islands for a number of years and decided it was time to give something back to the beautiful people and the wonderful islands of Cape Verde.

Music and Video Workshops

We started by giving free music and video workshops to young local talent. We brought the necessary materials for recording music and video with us from Europe, including some laptops, which we later gifted to the Music Centre.

This project will hopefully be extended in 2024/25 with a music and video collaboration project between the Netherlands and local music and video makers.

Read more about the Video Workshops or read more about the Music Workshops.

Planting trees

Soon it became clear that planting trees would be a very useful contribution so we started looking for donors. We approached the municipality of Tarrafal, where we are based, who helped us with the planting of mango trees along some new streets in the town, where shade was in short supply.

We bought the trees, they did the planting. The trees project was soon extended to small local farmers, who we supply with small trees they plant on their land. We are now hoping to start our own tree nursery so we don’t have to buy them anymore.

Computers on schools

We found out that many village schools are without computers and internet, so we found a sponsor in the Netherlands, who is giving us free computers, and started placing them in schools and community centres.

Plastic recycling

In future, we hope to start up a plastic recycling project because there is a lot of waste plastic pollution in the islands and in the sea. You can read more about it on this website.