Context

Building on a longstanding cooperation, DGIS and the GTZ discussed in 2005 to jointly promote ABS (access and benefit-sharing) capacity-building in Eastern and Southern Africa. For this purpose DGIS co-funded in 2005 and 2006 GTZ’s supra-regional program “Implementing the Biodiversity Convention” in order to organize a regional ABS capacity-building workshop and to present it’s results to the 4^th meeting of the CBD Ad hoc Open-Ended Working Group for ABS in January 2006 in Granada, Spain. Hence a Regional ABS Capacity-Building Workshop for Eastern and Southern Africa - conceptualized as an initial multi-stakeholder workshop - was held from 2^nd to 6^th October 2005 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, attended by 50 participants from 15 different countries.

Based on the substantive workshop results, the encouraging feedback of the participants and the overwhelming interest of representatives from African countries, who did not participate in the workshop, it was agreed to continue this cooperation as the Dutch-German ABS Capacity-Building Initiative for Africa, which was announced during a side event of the CBD COP 8 in March 2006 in Curitiba, Brazil.

Having held the initial multistakeholder workshops under this Initiative in October 2005 in Addis Ababa and in November 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa, it became obvious that on the one hand in many African countries there is already considerable knowledge and capacity on ABS and related issues. On the other hand there are significant hindrances for the application or use of these individual capacities – be it personal or organisational. These hindrances are mostly caused by inappropriate governance structures and policies at the local, national, supra-regional and international level. As the Initiative addresses also environmental governance and policies relevant for the successful implementation of ABS in Africa, the Initiative was renamed in January 2007 into the Dutch-German ABS Capacity Development Initiative for Africa. This reflects the need for systemic approaches to upgrade institutions and policies as well as long-term and flexible measures, especially when being challenged with efficient change management in an open-ended process such as the negotiations of the International Regime on ABS.

This cooperation is embedded in the ongoing activities of the supra-regional program “People and Biodiversity – Implementing the Biodiversity Convention” ( GTZ-Biodiv), which is implemented by GTZ on behalf of BMZ.