Workshop Review

World famous Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, South Africa, was the perfect venue to launch a milestone programme for biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation on the African continent. In the superb Kirstenbosch conference facilities the South African Department of Environment and Tourism (DEAT) hosted the initial workshop of the Dutch-German ABS Capacity-Building Initiative for Africa, inaugurated with a high-level opening.

Facing the slopes of Table Mountain 59 participants from 18 African and 4 non-African countries gathered from 19th to 24thNovember 2006 to create a common vision for access and benefit-sharing on the African continent and to develop a roadmap for the three year initiative.

A set of recommendations, which were elaborated during an orientation workshop in Addis Ababa in October 2006, provided the basis for this multi-stakeholder dialogue. Actually the “hand-over” of these recommendations was easily done as roughly one third of the participants attended also the meeting in Ethiopia. Furthermore some participants already presented the Addis results to an international audience at the ABS Working Group meeting in Granada, Spain (Jan 2006), and at the Conference of the Parties to the CBD in Curitiba, Brazil (March 2006), – and were therefore able to give feedback to the participants.

In comparison to the meeting in Addis Ababa, which defined first cornerstones for ABS in Africa, some elements changed within the Cape Town workshop:

• For the first time African business joined the dialogue process with representatives from governmental institutions, civil society organizations, local communities and academia.
• The platform was broadened from a regional (Southern and Eastern Africa) to a continent-wide scope, now including participants from Central and West African countries.
• A first training on legal aspects of the CBD and other relevant treaties for the successful implementation of ABS was provided.
• Based on concrete endeavours a discussion on ABS project approaches was initiated.

Participants appreciated very much these new aspects, as well as the continuous exchange and discussion of case studies on African ABS legislation best practices and bioprospecting examples. 

As such – besides a guided tour through the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden – the highlight of the week was the fieldtrip to !Kwa ttu, the San-Culture and Education Center, about 70 km north of Cape Town. At !Kwa ttu the group listened for almost an entire day to all stakeholders who are involved in the so called “Hoodia case”, a bioprospecting example from Southern Africa. Lively discussions followed.

“ABS is everything but easy to manage - this was really eye-opening”, one participant from Central Africa stated, getting to know for the first time concrete experiences on ABS – including differing views from different stakeholder perspectives.

Doubtless, the trip to the San, having provided first-hand experiences of ABS reality in Africa, has played a key role to achieve one objective of the workshop: developing a strong, compelling vision for ABS in Africa.

The Cape Town Vision was created over several sessions in a stepwise approach involving all stakeholder groups. It aims at defining the desired state of ABS in Africa through a concrete description of how ABS should “look and feel like” in 2010. Based on an initial vision developed by a group of government representatives the text was handed over for refining to representatives of business and science and finally to those of local and indigenous communities. The vision text was then finalised by a group representing all stakeholders and approved by all participants.

The vision provided the basis for an initial road map to implement the 3-year initiative especially during its first year