This information was taken from the SANBI newspage directly in appreciation of SANBI’s contributions
The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) has successfully supported twelve community-based organisations to develop and implement projects aimed at building resilience to climate change impacts through its Small Grant Facility’s (SGF’s) project which ran from 2015 – 2021.
The SGF project, now in its closing stage, delivered a range of tangible local benefits for 1 921 direct and 9 006 indirect beneficiaries through implementing projects under the following themes: climate resilient livelihoods, climate-smart agriculture and climate proof settlements.
In order to share learnings from the project, SANBI launched a set of communication products at a workshop. This brought together the SGF’s implementation partners, SGF small grant recipients, and representatives from local and national government institutions. The set of communication products include a series of nine case studies and an overview of the ‘Taking adaptation to the ground: A small Grants Facility for enabling local-level responses to climate change‘ project that was funded by the Adaptation Fund in two Districts of South Africa. The case study series was compiled by the project executing entity, SouthSouthNorth, and the project’s Facilitating Agencies (Conservation South Africa and CHoiCe Trust) as project deliverables with inputs from partners and stakeholders.
Drawing directly on the experiences of institutional role players, especially the Small Grant recipients themselves, the nine case studies aim to document the project processes, capture the outcomes and gather lessons learned towards the future scaling-up and replication of small grant financing approaches in South Africa and beyond.
‘The SGF project unfolded in tandem with the development of the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment’s National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy,’ says Mr Jonathan Ramayia from the National Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. ‘The project was invaluable for the Strategy’s practical implementation as far as community-based adaptation is concerned and allowed the Department to understand how international donor finance can be utilized in an innovative way so that resources flow to the most vulnerable groups of society.’
SANBI’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Shonisani Munzhedzi indicated that the SGF project’s learnings and outputs will unlock opportunities that contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals related to food security and water provision and could be scaled up to amplify benefits.
Subsequent to the workshop, the communication products have also been shared with the international community at a hybrid side event on ‘Partnerships for Climate Change Adaptation in South Africa’ in Glasgow at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as the COP26 Climate Conference.
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