Whether it’s how to organise a temporary fishery closure to catalyse community engagement in marine conservation or how to work holistically and integrate reproductive health services with such initiatives to enhance women’s participation in local environmental management efforts, we’re dedicated to supporting our partners to build on our experiences. Our collaborative relationships with partners are centred on mutual exchange, as we seek to share experiences openly across different contexts and learn from each other.
Our Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) toolkit, PHE partnerships guide and ODK mobile monitoring toolkit are available to download now! These comprehensive resources provide the information needed for programme development and are illustrated with practical case studies from our own implementation experiences.
Interactive training sessions and follow up support delivered by our technical specialists bring the content of our toolkits to life and enable our partners to develop the competencies needed to apply these models. This package ensures a deep technical understanding and adequate monitoring & evaluation of results.
We offer to guide our partners through every step of their journey, facilitating reflection on appropriate organisational values to underpin implementation and acting as a sounding board for adaption of these approaches in new contexts. We strongly encourage their aspirations to champion these models by supporting them to play a leading role in national or regional learning networks.
We can facilitate regional learning exchanges as well as visits to our field sites for NGO staff and local community members including fishers. Our carefully designed itineraries are tailored to meet the individual needs of our partners and may feature a variety of our programmes in line with our holistic approach to conservation. Emphasis is placed on practical learning and mutual sharing of experiences.
The exchange was a powerful opportunity for our partner community members to witness the benefits of temporary octopus fishery closures and discuss some of the challenges in implementing these effectively.
BV has since linked us into Madagascar's national LMMA network, invited us to a regional workshop in Zanzibar to share experiences of community-based fisheries management, and most recently provided us with valuable technical advice that enabled us to secure funding to explore integrating reproductive health services with our local marine conservation initiatives.
This post is the first of a 3-part series on the use of customary law (sasi) by communities from Maluku archipelago in Indonesia and how these practices have helped communities to rebuild their fisheries. My first experience of Sasi September
