It has been a year and a half into COLIBRI and while we had many battles to fight during that challenging and heady time what with COVID a country in economic crisis, a nation in agitation and general downturns across pretty much everything. Despite these challenges we still managed to meet our tasks head-on and during those engagements we tried not to take the easy way out, constantly rethinking our thinking. From those we extracted two short cases studies cum best practices (as part of a four study exercise) based on our experiences.

The first was on how to engage in sensitive areas where people and protected areas rub shoulders with one another. In that, we realized quickly that a community was a far bigger organism than most NGOs – indeed – most people suspect and we unpacked all of that through a fairly decent grammar while also talking about the way in which we blanket covered the area and literally left no one behind thereby actually increasing our workload but also massively improving the volume work that our donor funds were capable of delivering on the ground. You can read that study here.

The second was how we used the improvement of green cover across that terrain to increase community cohesion with everyone from state officials to medical officers, police, community farmers, youth and children, activists etc. getting enthusiastically involved in the effort that didn’t simply look at the protected area only but the larger terrain that had been damaged by rather ill-though initiatives – including myopic ideas of protection that caused more damage than it prevented. You can read that study here.