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Background
The Small Grants Programme (SGP) was launched
in 1991 by United Nations Development Programme’s
(UNDP) and Global Environment Facility (GEF).
It has been operating in India since 2000 with
Centre for Environment Education (CEE) as the
National Host Institution (NHI). The programme
is sourced with a belief that global environmental
problems can only be addressed adequately, if
local people are involved in decision making at
all levels within projects and have control over
resources. With small amounts of funding, communities
can undertake activities, which make a significant
difference to their livelihoods and environment.
The success of SGP is based on involvement of
local people in decision-making and planning,
and sharing of roles and responsibilities at all
levels. Non Governmental and Community Based Organisations
as implementing agencies act as facilitators,
raising awareness and socially motivating the
community to generate a demand. Once this level
of understanding has been reached the agencies
can transfer technologies and ideas and put the
programmes into action.
SGP demonstrates even with small amounts of funding,
communities can undertake activities that make
a significant difference to their livelihoods
and the environment. The active role of communities
in SGP management means that they can understand
and perceive the importance and advantages of
alternative methods.
Workshop
At the interactive sessions in the “Local
Initiatives as Global Learning Opportunities”
workshop, the focus was on how institutions, communities,
policy makers and other stakeholders can learn
from small local sustainable development projects,
and how best practices can be shared to both replicate
and up-scale the programmes. The effort was also
to discuss how to share these lessons with other
related stakeholders, including donors, for greater
environment and livelihood benefits.
Another focus of the workshop was to explore
what aspects of education have played a key role
in strengthening the GEF SGP projects, and how
education can help in improving sustainability
of projects. The workshop focused on and identified
areas of capacity building for NGOs (technical,
documentation, accounting practices, raising co-financing
& reporting). It initiated sharing of learning’s,
knowledge management and information dissemination
between partner countries and examine how better
forecasting of policy influence and intervention,
local co-financing and dovetailing of resources
can be done.
This Workshop was in the context of a longer
regional consultation on SGP. As the beginning
of 2005 marks the launch of the GEF SGP’s
Third Operational Phase in South Asia, these Regional
Consultations are to learn, consolidate, share
and inform the lessons documented from the First
(1992-1995) and Second (1995-2004) phases, and
evaluate the insights emerging from the respective
Ex-post project studies. The outcome of these
enables the various countries to maintain high
quality implementation standards and build lessons
into the existing Country Programme Strategy (CPS).
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