2021 Southern Africa Edition
With the Biodiversity Partners program 2021,
a group of 25 pioneers from Southern Africa had the opportunity to join a transformative training program for the realization of their pro-nature projects.
Why Southern Africa ?
Beyond the incredible variety of landscapes and the wild diversity of species, Southern Africa is a high-spirited region on biodiversity issues and has a long history of biodiversity protection and community-based natural resources management.
Southern Africa gathers numerous changemakers who create solutions to global and local challenges: their projects mitigate climate change effects, rebalance the ecosystems against the invasive species, rethink the exploitation of natural ressources, promote preservation values, reinvent tourism, banking or agricultural practices.
The Biodiversity Partners Program accompany this trend so that projects combining biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development in Southern Africa are fully sustainable.
The ambition
Explore: During the first weeks, the participants started to build their community and discovered new aspects about biodiversity, deep ecology, indigenous knowledge and complex systems. A prerequisite to action !
Experiment: During a one-week design sprint accompanied by design thinking specialists, the participants identified concrete actions and refined their projects to reach more viability and accuracy.
Grow: The third stage gave the participants the tools to develop indispensible business skills such as marketing or finance.
In 2021, the Campus AFD (training center of the French Development Agency), the Sustainability Institute, the African Management Institute and Edtech Connection launched the first edition of the Biodiversity Partners Program in Southern Africa (100% digital edition).
The ambition of this training program was to bring biodiversity considerations to new fields and to create a regional community with similar goals.
25 project holders from 6 countries were taken into a four month journey, split in three phases : Explore, Experiment and Grow.
A 4 month journey
During the first weeks, participants discovered new topics about biodiversity, opened new fields of knowledge, built a profound feeling of belonging and learnt how to manage complexity. A prerequisite to action !
During the second stage, the participants made, with the help of Keneilwe Munyai, resonate the knowledge and feelings of the first stage to transform it into concrete action for their projects.
The human-centred design sprint helped them envision new solutions and other paths in order for them to lead their project towards viability and accuracy.
The third stage gave the participants the tools to refine their project thanks to business skills such as marketing or finance.
Check out the 20 other participants' stories