First IKI networking workshop in South Africa

IKI Projects in South Africa presented their activities in the course of a networking workshop in Pretoria.

In Pretoria the first networking workshop of projects funded by the German Environment Ministry’s (BMU) International Climate Initiative (IKI) took place on 18-19 April 2018. Some 60 participants took part in the workshop, coming from more than 14 IKI projects that run activities either exclusively in or at least including South Africa in regional African or global IKI projects.

Representatives from the participating South African (DEA) and German Environmental Ministries BMU as well as from the German Embassy in Pretoria emphasized in their welcoming speeches the challenges that South Africa faces to combating climate change and to protecting biodiversity as well as the good relations between the two countries. With South Africa’s increasingly visible effects of climate change and an ongoing high share of coal to generate electricity, IKI’s project activities on mitigation, adaptation and protection of forests and biodiversity were highly acknowledged.

The IKI project portfolio in South Africa was presented by the bilateral Climate Support Programm (CSP) which is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. This IKI project also serves as an interface project for the IKI in South Africa. It organised and invited IKI projects to the workshop. The IKI programme office gave a presentation on the steps in the IKI call for proposals, the selection criteria, the intervention logic of outputs, outcome and impact and reporting procedures.

The exhibition of some 22 IKI projects and their activities in South Africa was inspired by the Souk Ukaz annual markets, that lasted 20 days, not only for the exchange of goods, but also for cultural and intellectual exchange. “Network” was literary done in a practical exercise when participants could connect threads between topics and stakeholders for their projects that created a complex and impressive “3D-IKI-Network”.

The exchange between projects to tap potential synergies is one of the requirements for IKI projects according to the IKI knowledge management. During the workshop, many individual, round table talks and discussions between IKI implementing organisation and ministries of both countries took place in this spirit.

The discussions revealed that specifically in South Africa, there is a number of topics such as job creations, monocultures in agriculture and forestry as well as promotional programmes for local authorities that need attention and integration when implementing the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) of the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).