Resource Africa supports rural African community efforts to secure their rights to access and use their natural resources in order to sustain their livelihoods. We help to build strong platforms for collaboration, knowledge, skills sharing, and joint advocacy to ensure community voices are heard in debates that materially affect their lives.
We believe that when rights are upheld and incentives for conservation are provided to those who live with wildlife there will be positive conservation outcomes benefitting people and nature.
News, Videos, Podcasts and Webinars, Open Letters, Statements, and Opinion Pieces from the members of the Community Leaders Network, Resource Africa Partners and Affiliates, Youth Voices and Contributing Writers.
The CLN release an audio clip of the Statement to SBSTTA Virtual Session Listen to this clip of the Community Leaders Network (CLN) statement delivered by CLN Coordinator, Ms. Maxi...
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Community Leaders Network: SBSTTA Statement Leave no voice unheard! Sustainable use of biodiversity is a human rights issue in Africa We, the Community Leaders Network (CLN), representing community organisations engaged in...
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Resource Africa is excited to announce the appointment of Leslé Jansen, our new Chief Executive Officer for Resource Africa Southern Africa. A lawyer specialising in Indigenous Peoples in International Law, Ms. Jansen brings to RA over 15 years' experience working with local communities on resource and related rights as these relate to environmental and social justice across southern Africa. She brings a wealth of experience and insight to RA from her perspective as a South African who identifies as indigenous, as a lawyer skilled at negotiation and policy, and her knowledge of the southern African region in particular, and indigenous and local communities across the African continent.
“It is partly my indigenous identify that drew me to law and specifically to indigenous resource rights. This is where I have spent the last eight years to ensure indigenous peoples get recognition in some form from their knowledge, which was, and in some cases continues to be appropriated,” she says.
A major milestone in her career was, as one of a team of two lawyers, supporting a coalition of around 40 communities in South Africa to lay claim to high value traditional resource species such as Rooibos, and a share of the benefits. This was done in the context of the Nagoya Protocol policy framework on access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“Their [indigenous communities’] knowledge contributed to build successful industries. They were never recognised for this,” she says. The result was that key industries were brought into compliance with the Protocol and, as a form of restitution for some, the industry will pay a generational traditional knowledge levy to the communities who will set up community trusts to determine how the benefits will be shared and distributed. This has set a key precedent for other communities across the continent and the world.
Ms Jansen has a strong commitment to Africa and African issues, particularly as they relate to the spiritual, material and cultural meaning of the continent’s resources to its people that the world has benefitted greatly from. She is an indigenous expert member to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ special mechanism – the Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities in Africa.
“RA aligns very well with my personal ethos and what I hope to do in the world. I hope to learn in terms of their work with the struggles of communities for their resource rights. I want to add my weight in these struggles. I see it as a way of weaving the tapestry back in a way that communities can benefit from their resources and knowledge that they offer the world,” says Ms Jansen.
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In the latest of Resource Africa’s series Let Africans Decide video series, Moreangels Mbizah, a member of the Community Leaders Network, reflects on her journey in wildlife conservation – from Zimbabwe’s Lowveld to Oxford University and back.
Recent media coverage about conservation, COVID19, biodiversity, sustainable use, CBNRM, indigenous and local community rights.
Facts matter: conservation scientists debunk myths about trophy hunting ‘Facts matter and misinformation can have devastating real-world impacts’ Expressing their concern about an opinion piece by photographer Cyril Christo published in...
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Celebrity power undermining global conservation efforts, scientists warn Finally, the voices of Africa’s rural communities are being heard. Congratulations Alex Morss on an important article. Delighted you’re hearing the voices...
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Over 800 million people live in tropical forests and savannahs in developing countries. Indigenous and rural communities have a particularly close relationship with these natural systems. They rely on them to meet their essential needs, from food and shelter to energy and medicines, but they also maintain a strong personal, cultural and spiritual relationship with these environments. Indigenous peoples and local communities are also historic custodians of the planet’s most important reservoirs of biodiversity, including forests.
International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the cultural, economic, political and social achievements of women. enlighten and empower women and girls worldwide to choose to challenge stereotypes and oppose bias to help create the change we want to shape a fairer future in a more inclusive and gender equal world.
This year’s theme is #ChooseToChallenge
As women we can be stronger and more powerful when we work together.
In spite of the ongoing efforts, biodiversity has continued to deteriorate worldwide, and this decline is only projected to worsen in the years to come. To prevent this, and ensure that the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity is integrated into policies that will guide the post-pandemic economic and developmental recovery plans, governments from around the world will convene at the UN Biodiversity Conference in May 2021. The event will see the setting of new goals for nature over the next decade, through the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 framework process. It will also involve the planning of broad-based action to bring about a transformation in society’s relationship with biodiversity and to ensure that by 2050, the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is fulfilled.
