The Stakeholder involvement included consultations, information dissemination and related activities that took place during the PPG Phase in South Africa. The PPG team established and maintained close contact with stakeholders in the bioprospecting industry in South Africa, at the national, provincial and local community levels. The affected national and local government institutions were identified and directly involved in the PPG phase as well as the main development partners, implementing agencies, governance bodies and value chain actors. There were several engagements with the stakeholders to interrogate the different aspects of the project design.
Those engagements included:
Discussions with multilateral agencies like the UNDP and the IUCN, national public institutions like SANBI, DEA and DST, ARC, CSIR and TRAFFIC and other bioprospecting value chain actors to solicit information on the current project baseline, consult, on proposed project interventions and confirm the political, administrative, operational and financial commitment of project partners (including securing co-financing commitments).
A series of consultative field visits and meetings with relevant and responsible institutions in the project target areas of the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape, Gauteng and the north-West provinces, was carried out by the PPG team. It enabled its members to gain understanding of the local context in which the project will be implemented, the physical scale of the project, the governance processes, some of the local challenges faced by the various actors, and to consultatively identify prospective solutions to the challenges related with strengthening the value chains in the bioprospecting sector in South Africa.
Carrying out project workshops - the PPG inception workshop was held to introduce the project and establish relationship with the stakeholders. Another workshop was held with stakeholders to ensure their participation in the formulation and development of the project indicators. A validation workshop was held to present to all stakeholders the detailed project outputs, activities, the budget and implementation arrangements.
The PPG team also engaged in an iterative process of disseminating and presenting the project document to the individual stakeholders to enable them to review and comment on the draft documents.
The approach to stakeholder involvement and participation during project implementation was based on the principles outlined in the in the table below:
Principle
Stakeholder Participation will
Value adding
Be an essential means of adding value to the project
The design of this Project incorporates several features and activities to ensure ongoing and effective stakeholder participation. The project implementation mechanisms in place will facilitate involvement and active participation of different elements:
Project inception workshop to enable stakeholder awareness of the beginning of the project implementation. This event will take the form of a multi stakeholder workshop. The workshop will provide an opportunity for all stakeholders to get acquainted with the most updated information on the project and workplan. It will also establish a basis for further consultation as the project implementation commences. The inception workshop will address many key issues including assisting all implementation partners to fully understand and take ownership of the project, detail roles support services and complimentary responsibilities of the diverse stakeholders. The inception workshop will capacitate all partners identified with the plan for implementation of the project outputs and activities and discuss the roles, functions and responsibilities with the project structure, including reporting and communication lines and conflict resolution mechanisms. The inception workshop will also be a forum to review the project budget, finalise the first annual workplan as well as review and agree on the indicators, targets and their means of verification, recheck assumptions and risks, and to provide a detailed overview of reporting, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements.
Establishment of a Project Management Team to oversee stakeholder engagement processes during the project.
Project communications -- to facilitate ongoing awareness of project. The project will develop, implement and maintain a communications strategy to ensure that all stakeholders are informed on an ongoing basis about: the project’s objectives, the projects activities, overall project progress, and the opportunities for involvement in various aspects of the project implementation. This strategy will ensure the use of communication techniques and approaches that are appropriate to the local contexts such as appropriate language and other skills that enhance communication effectiveness. The project will develop and maintain a web-based platform for sharing and disseminating information on strengthening bioprospecting value chains across the project planning domain
Stakeholder consultations and participation in project implementation. A comprehensive stakeholder consultations and participation process will be developed and implemented for all project outputs/activities, building on the process already started during the PPG stage (refer to Annex X-4 for more information on the Stakeholders consulted during the PPG). A participatory approach will be adopted to facilitate the continued involvement of local stakeholders including the women and youth (refer to Annex X-7 for the . Wherever possible, opportunities will be created to train and employ residents from villages proximate to sites targeted for project intervention.
Formal structures to facilitate stakeholder involvement in project activities. The project will also actively seek to establish formalized structures to ensure the ongoing participation of local and institutional stakeholders in project activities.
Capacity building: All project activities are strategically focused on building the capacity at the systemic, institutional and individual level -- to ensure sustainability of initial project investments. The project will, wherever possible, use the services and facilities of existing local training and skills development institutions.
3) Coordination with other related initiatives
Detailed coordination with other ongoing initiatives and amongst project partners has been built into the project design. See, for example, the section on Results and Partnerships.
