First BID grants provide nearly €1 million in funding to 23 African projects

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The GBIF Secretariat has announced the 23 projects in sub-Saharan Africa chosen as the first recipients of funding from the EU-funded Biodiversity Information for Development programme (BID).

The 3 regional, 10 national and 10 small grants provide a total of €972,156 in funding to recipients from 34 organizations and 20 African countries, which will leverage €817,369 in co-funding from other sources. An international panel selected them after a multi-stage process that initially drew 143 applications from 34 of the 48 eligible countries.

The selected projects range across not only diverse geographies but also many thematic areas. The proposed collaborations will seek to build institutional capacity, to mobilize data on Red Listed species and targeted groups of species, and to digitize and share data from museum collections, parks and protected areas. Others harvest species data from activities focused on human health, food security and the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

“It’s exciting to reach this first milestone for BID, in part because the programme aligns so well with GBIF’s approach to mobilizing biodiversity data,” said Donald Hobern, GBIF executive secretary. “We look forward to seeing significant increases to both capacity and content as a result of these projects.”

BID is a multi-year, €3.9 million programme funded by the European Union and led by GBIF, which aims to increase the amount of biodiversity information available for use in scientific research and policymaking in the ‘ACP’ nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

GBIF will issue the next BID calls for proposals, focused on the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, later in 2016. A final call for sub-Saharan Africa is planned for 2017.

Regional distribution of ACP countries represented in selected projects

• West Africa: Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo

• Central Africa: Cameroon, DR Congo, Gabon

• Eastern and Southern Africa: Madagascar, Zimbabwe

• East African Community: Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda

• Southern Africa Development Community: Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa

List of selected projects

Regional projects

• Capacity building and biodiversity data mobilization for conservation, sustainable use, and decision making in Africa and Madagascar (Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, DR Congo, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Senegal and United States)

• Strengthening collaboration for increased biodiversity mobilization on key biodiversity ecosystems of the Albertine Rift Region (Uganda, DR Congo and Rwanda)

• African Insect Atlas: Unleashing the potential of insects in conservation and sustainability research in Africa (Madagascar, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa)

National projects

• Capacity enhancement for Ghana node of GBIF

• Organizing and mobilizing biodiversity information from the Kenya Wildlife Service

• Towards a Red List of the globally threatened plants of Guinea

• Capacity building and biodiversity data mobilization to address health and food security priorities in Benin

• Building capacity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to establish an effective GBIF Participant node (project discontinued)

• Strengthening the biodiversity stakeholders network in Togo

• Support for data collection of plant biodiversity in Gabon

• Development of a funding mechanism and efficient management of data on plant biodiversity in Côte d’Ivoire

• Strengthening of an institutional network in Angola to mobilize national biodiversity data

• Senegalese National Information System on Biodiversity: SENBIO-INFOS

Small grants

• Gathering of biodiversity data on bird species for their sustainable management in Benin

• Making the zoology collection at the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe accessible through GBIF

• Kenya’s other carnivores: Harnessing biodiversity data for effective development of national conservation strategies

• Mobilizing plant biodiversity data in Uganda through training

• Data rescue for records of the Botswana Wildlife Management Association

• Mobilization of diversity data on bees for conservation and sustainable development of the beekeeping sector in Cameroon

• Mobilizing data on freshwater snails in Kenya

• Mobilization of biodiversity data of protected area and threatened species in Benin

• Mobilizing biodiversity data from the forest reserves of southern and central Benin

• Establishing metadata of biodiversity data generated from REDD+ projects in Tanzania

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This programme is funded by the European Union._