Capacity Building and Protected Areas are crosscutting themes, with the former being mandatory in all projects.

Sub-Saharan African institutions often lack the human and technical capacity to document biodiversity data and knowledge. We invest in creating skills, adding knowledge and tools, and developing relationships that will help our grantee partners succeed. Our grantmaking in capacity building focuses on partnerships, training, strengthening networks, reaching into related sectors, sharing knowledge, and improving project evaluation.

Protected Areas (PAs) represent core biodiversity refugia within landscapes undergoing rapid land use change across Africa. Our grantmaking focuses on support for establishing or expanding biodiversity informatics research programs to benefit the conservation of existing PAs, establish or extend ecological corridors, or propose new PAs. Through this work, we contribute to the 30×30 Global Biodiversity Framework, ensuring that areas critical for biodiversity are effectively conserved and managed for the future.

Our initiatives for Capacity Building & Protected Areas are:

Initiative 1: In-Project Training – Builds in-project capacity with formal courses and experiential (on-the-job) training across our grant portfolios. During project development, we assess capacity-building needs to ensure that all projects get the types of training needed to strengthen their internal capacity. Grantees engage in professional networks, short technical courses, and budget funds for training. Training is most effective when targeted at professionals and graduate students (MSc/PhD), when projects explicitly facilitate know-how transfer from non-African experts, and when hands-on, experiential training is a core component of project implementation.

Initiative 2: Biodiversity Informatics Training – Funds long-term professional training, African training capacity, and links training to project opportunities. Training courses are a way to build partnerships with those who share our interest in Biodiversity Informatics.

Initiative 3: Regional Capacity Support and Partnerships – Includes investments in conferences, workshops and partnerships that strengthen African regional systems for Biodiversity Informatics.

Initiative 4: Biodiversity Informatics for Protected Areas – Includes investments in training for Protected Areas staff, generation of baseline and monitoring data for existing or prospective PAs, development of tools and technologies for collecting, managing and sharing data and information.