Strengthening resilience: Strategic trainings for conservation of Africa’s biocultural diversity
The African Biodiversity Network is spearheading efforts to enhance community and ecosystem resilience through strategic training and consultative forums, fostering conservation of Africa’s rich biocultural diversity amidst an escalating climate crisis. Jane Kinya, Gender and CEG Coordinator at ABN, recounts.
The African Biodiversity Network (ABN) foresees vibrant and resilient African communities rooted in their biological, cultural, and spiritual diversity, governing their lives and livelihoods while living harmoniously within healthy ecosystems. ABN has a unique opportunity to shape the narrative on the use of indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and connection to nature to avert further loss of biocultural diversity and conserve Africa’s rich biodiversity. Through strategic narratives, communities, ABN partners, and all other stakeholders can effectively and continuously address the increasingly severe climate crisis.
To keenly and continuously position itself, all the functions of the network must be well resourced, and staff must be well equipped with the required capacities, working closely with other stakeholders to form formidable forces to address the crisis.
Capacity enhancement of the network
In April and May, the ABN Secretariat organised a series of integrated capacity enhancement trainings for ABN partners using the sub-regional nodes approach. Three trainings were hosted in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Benin, with partners participating from the Eastern, Southern, Western, and Central-North nodes. The key themes for these trainings were gender analysis, gender programming and budgeting, policy, advocacy and communication, seed cataloguing as well as good practices in monitoring and evaluation.
The trainings aimed to sharpen the skills of ABN staff and partners in project and institutional management for improved results. These trainings addressed the gaps identified during organisational assessments. During these sessions, strategic horizontal networking and sharing of experiences by partners in each node based on their context took place, further deepening the operations of the sub-regional nodes. Below are key reflections and lessons from the trainings.
Regarding advocacy and policy influencing, there is a need for ABN to identify key priority issues in the region, support advocacy with evidence, set clear influencing strategies, ensure sustained campaigns supported by resources, and provide continuous capacity building of key actors along with context analysis insights. Partners also noted that ABN, as a network, needs to leverage the strengths and experiences of its partner organisations, especially by strengthening the sub-regional nodes’ approach and networking through reaching out to partners in countries where regional and global bodies are hosted and their work is relevant to the ABN philosophy, to position the network as a formidable policy influencer at local, national, regional, and global levels, thus deepening ABN’s overall policy influencing impact.
Regarding gender analysis, programming, and budgeting, partners were equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to integrate gender considerations into organisational policies, projects, and programmes. The trainings also improved partners’ understanding of gendered perspectives, enabling them to address the root causes of gender inequalities, counter gender stereotyping, and create more room for women’s participation in biocultural conservation matters and governance.
Together with communities and partners, ABN has developed effective ways and methods of working with vulnerable communities. This is based on the principle that cultural and ecological diversity are intricately bound, and that by restoring people’s strong and deep sense of connectedness to nature and all that lies within it, communities will find ways to be resilient and sustain their land and natural resources. Recognising the importance of gender principles of equity and equality is crucial for creating resilient communities. The ABN Gender and Responsive Action Plan (GRAP) 2022 to 2026 continues to serve as a reference point for ABN’s gender journey.
The importance of tracking results, having evidence of impact, and leveraging visibility through effective and strategic communications and tapping into the digital paradigm shift was extensively underscored during the communication besides monitoring and evaluation trainings. More follow-up trainings will be conducted in the future. ABN and its partners agreed to undertake a gender analysis and to scrutinise their systems, structures, and methodologies to ensure compliance with minimum gender standards. Partners further committed to increasing documentation and communication, as well as monitoring and evaluation of their work for accelerated results in line with the relevant SDGs and provisions of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (K-M GBF).