Knowing our Lands and Resources: Indigenous and Local Knowledge of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Africa

Introduction

The Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) includes as one of its operating principles the following commitment:

Recognize and respect the contribution of indigenous and local knowledge to the

conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystems.

                                               UNEP/IPBES.MI/2/9, Appendix 1, para. 2 (d)

To spearhead its work on this challenging objective, IPBES Plenary created at its Second Meeting the Task Force on Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) Systems.

The present document is a contribution to the IPBES regional assessment for Africa. Its aim is twofold:

To assist the co-chairs, coordinating lead authors and lead authors of the regional assessment

for Africa by facilitating their access to indigenous and local knowledge relevant to the

assessment theme.

To pilot the initial approaches and procedures for building ILK into IPBES assessments that

are under development by the ILK task force in order to test their efficacy and improve the

final ILK approaches and procedures that the task force will propose to the Plenary of IPBES.

Read more: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002474/247461E.pdf

Gender, Poverty and Environmental Indicators on African Countries

This is the sixteenth volume of Gender, Poverty and Environmental Indicators on African Countries published by the Statistics Department of the African Development Bank Group. The publication provides some information on the broad development trends relating to gender, poverty and environmental issues in the 53 African countries. Gender, Poverty and Environmental indicators on African Countries 2015 was prepared by the Economic and Social Statistics Division of the Statistics Department. 




Read Online: http://www.afdb.org/fileadmin/uploads/afdb/Documents/Publications/Gender_Poverty_and_Environmental_Indicators_on_African_Countries_-_2015.pdf

Economic Report on Africa 2015: Industrializing through trade

This Report examines and provides analysis on the critical elements of effectively fostering industrialization and hence structural transformation based on an extensive review of experience with industrialised countries and Africa’s post-independence attempt at industrialization. Ten country case studies were also conducted to shed light on industrializing through trade. The findings from this exercise informed the policy recommendations contained in this Report.

 

Download report: http://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/PublicationFiles/era2015_eng_fin.pdf

Why Africa's Vultures Are "Collapsing Toward Extinction"

A demand for vulture parts in witchcraft, as well as poisoning and urbanization, has caused a nearly 90 percent decline in the scavengers' populations.

Across Africa, vultures are electrocuted by power lines or crushed by wind turbines. Their brains are ground to snuff by witch doctors who believe the substance has magical powers. They die after eating  pesticide-laced carcasses intended for lions and other predators.

As a result, vulture populations are plummeting.

Africa's eight vulture species have declined in number by an average of 62 percent during the last 30 years, according to the first estimates of a continent-wide decline in the large birds. Six of those species would likely be considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150731-vultures-africa-birds-animals-science/

Sustainable Settlements to Combat Urban Slums in Africa

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa's progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years.

Africa's urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

Continue reading: http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/09/sustainable-settlements-to-combat-urban-slums-in-africa

The many dimensions of Africa's digital divide

Internet access is essential to unlocking Africa’s future and opening up the economic and social opportunities that this global network of networks can bring. While there has been robust growth in internet usage across the continent over the past few years and adoption continues to climb, Africa still sits on the cusp of the internet revolution and much work remains to be done.

With Tunis as its backdrop, the future of the internet in Africa is set to take centre stage at the 2015 Africa Internet Summit where ministers, policymakers, business participants, civil society representatives and technology workers will gather to discuss the key internet-related development issues facing Africa today. They will also look at how different countries across the continent approach the digital divide.

Rwanda has long recognised the value of the internet in helping to transform its agrarian, lower-income economy into one that is both knowledge-based and middle-income. But having implemented the standard measures, with significant results, the government understands how bridging the digital divide is a truly multidimensional challenge. It is not enough to focus on developing the infrastructure to access the internet, it is also important to build the capacity to promote, develop and host content locally.

Read more:http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/may/29/africa-digital-divide-mobile-internet?

How to bridge Africa’s infrastructure gap

The infrastructure chain of delivery involves many complex phases, starting from detailed planning, identification of the project, preparing the project for financing, the financing of the project, the building of the project, and to the operation and maintenance of the project itself. Each of these phases require careful thought and effective capacity to ensure success.

Often as a result of the overwhelming deficit of infrastructure in Africa, coupled with the urgent need to address this deficit, we adopt an aspirational approach (everything will go well) to the delivery of infrastructure. We adopt a mind-set that assumes that infrastructure projects in Africa are too important to fail. Accordingly, stakeholders seek at a high level broad agreement on these complex issues only to be confronted with disagreements as implementation deadlines approach.

We would serve Africa’s infrastructure delivery better if stakeholders adopted a more grounded reality based approach – identifying all the things that could go wrong in each of the phases and by applying resilient risk mitigation to each of these challenges. This would necessitate obtaining consensus among all players upfront and before the commencement of the project, on the business factors or credit aspects of the project, the political and regulatory decisions required and on the macroeconomic and other factors that could affect the project. It is accepted that finding such consensus is often time consuming and involves robust and difficult conversations. It is better that consensus around these issues are obtained first, rather than failure to complete a project on the basis of disagreements that occur during the implementation of the project.

Adopting a reality based approach to infrastructure delivery assumes that all role players are capacitated to manage the complex issues that arise during the different phases of an infrastructure project. Africa would serve itself well by ensuring that governments acquire these necessary skills housed in a central capacity playing a project management role throughout the entire value chain involved in the efficient and effective delivery of infrastructure projects.

Readmore:  https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/06/how-to-bridge-africas-infrastructure-gap/

Africa's health centre at the frontline of HIV research

The Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies sits in the HIV capital of the world. The sleek modern building, rising out of an otherwise rustic setting near Mtubatuba in South Africa, attracts world-class researchers looking to wage war against the resilient virus.

“It’s the frontline,” says Deenan Pillay, the centre’s director, on secondment as professor of virology at University College London. “We’re in one of the highest-incidence HIV areas in the world and it is essential to understand how to reduce new cases. I’m very privileged to be working with this population and it’s a place where I think research can very clearly be seen to be making a difference.”

The centre opened in 1998 and receives £3.5m to £4m a year from the Wellcome Trust, along with more than double that amount from external funders including French and American health agencies, the EU, the South African Medical Research Council and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The list of papers published by the centre’s researchers in scientific journals numbers 99 last year alone.

Currently part-hidden by scaffolding as it undergoes renovations to expand its operations, the Africa Centre lies deep in rural KwaZulu-Natal province, close to a wildlife park where elephants and rhinos roam. Many local people are subsistence farmers living in traditional thatched-roof rondavels and keeping chickens and goats. Rates of tuberculosis among the local population are extraordinarily high.

Reducing HIV, TB and other associated diseases is at the heart of the Africa Centre’s work, according to Pillay, but the benefits go far beyond South Africa. “The research that we do there is highly relevant to other similar poor areas of the world in terms of how to counteract HIV.”

Continue reading: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/26/africas-health-centre-at-the-frontline-of-hiv-research

For African tourism, the future means 'profits with principles'

Responsible tourism is the future for Africa, as travelers increasingly want authentic, genuine and responsible holidays. This was the key focus at the World Travel Market Africa Responsible Tourism Conference (WTM Africa) in Cape Town, South Africa, this month.

During WTM Africa, heroes of responsible tourism in Africa were honored at the 2015 African Responsible Tourism Awards Ceremony. Among the winners were Chumbe Island in Zanzibar, Coffee Beans Routes in South Africa and Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana. The overall winner of the awards was Gansbaai Tourism in South Africa.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Heidi van der Watt, managing director of Better Tourism Africa, said the winners of the awards all have a vision that extends beyond the commercial, linking business success with the well-being of local communities and the longevity of their environments. 

“They want to make profits with principles, communicate balance sheets alongside beliefs and won’t undermine passion in the pursuit of professionalism,” she said. “They are the future of tourism in Africa." 

But, although industry players strongly believe that responsible tourism is the future for Africa, inbound tour operators to Africa report that there is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to educating the public on responsible tourism.

Read more: http://www.travelweekly.com/Middle-East-Africa-Travel/Insights/For-African-tourism-the-future-means-profits-with-principles

Africa’s Natural Resources: 3 Things Governments Need to Get Right

Africa has about a third of the world’s mineral resources, but most of its citizens remain desperately poor and don’t receive the benefits of their natural resource wealth. These resources could generate substantial social, economic and political benefits for Africa, but only if they are pursued in a transparent and accountable way that respects peoples’ fundamental human rights.

Oxfam has been working on extractive industries in West Africa for more than 10 years, and we’re expanding our work into a total of 15 countries in Africa this year. In February we met in South Africa and heard about the challenges our partners are facing across the continent. 

 

There is incredible variety: Oxfam partners are working in countries that are just discovering and beginning to develop resources, like Mozambique, Uganda, and Kenya, as well as countries with a long and often troubled history of natural resource extraction like Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. We want to highlight three key priorities of their work in Africa, and three key trends we’ve seen emerge over the past several years.

 

 Read more: http://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2015/04/africas-natural-resources-3-things-governments-need-to-get-right/

African elephant numbers likely to decline due to continued poaching

A high rate of elephant poaching in parts of Africa was unchanged in 2014 compared to the previous year, meaning that a continued decline in elephant numbers is likely, according to a study released Monday at a conservation meeting in Kasane.

A report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as CITES and which regulates wildlife trade, said poaching rates of elephants in areas that are being monitored still exceed their natural birth rates.Conservationists say tens of thousands of elephants have been killed in Africa in recent years as demand for ivory in Asia, particularly China, increases. Past estimates of Africa’s elephant population have ranged from 420,000 to 650,000.

The poaching situation appears to have deteriorated in Central and West Africa, though there are “encouraging signals” in parts of East Africa where overall poaching levels have declined, said John Scanlon, secretary-general of CITES. The study was presented at an international conference on the threat to elephants that was held in the tourist town of Kasane in northern Botswana. A similar meeting was held in 2013 in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital.

Read more: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/24/world/african-elephant-numbers-likely-decline-due-continued-poaching/

Poaching and illegal wildlife trade threaten tourism and development options in Africa

Panelists at an event held in Berlin, Germany, during ITB — the world’s largest tourism fair concurred  that record poaching levels of rhinos and elephants are not only threatening the basis of tourism but also tourism-based development options in Africa.

 

In his opening remarks, Hon. Moses Kalongashawa, Minister of Tourism and Culture in Malawi, and Chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Ministers responsible for Tourism noted that the issue of poaching is of huge concern and Africa is losing wildlife at record rates each year to poachers and illegal trade. He said this was because of the involvement of organized criminal syndicates in elephant and rhino poaching, with criminals now deploying advanced technologies ranging from night vision scopes, silenced weapons, darting equipment and helicopters, to carry out their missions.

For more information visit: http://www.traffic.org/home/2014/3/7/poaching-and-illegal-wildlife-trade-threaten-tourism-and-dev.html

Toward Africa's Green Future

The decimation of habitats, plants and animals in the wild continues at an unprecedented pace. Given the centrality of natural resources to sustainable economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa, conserving this irreplaceable stock of species and ecosystems is of fundamental importance.This report reviews World Bank support to biodiversity conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade (2003-2012), and presents key lessons and directions for the Bank's future biodiversity-related investments.

 This report is available at:

http://allafrica.com/download/resource/main/main/idatcs/00050089:d6e4b80eb1a27a0dfaef4f93a87db956.pdf...