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New
initiatives were recommended for the SABONET Project during its Mid-term
Review of February 2001 and
Botanical Gardens Workshop of March 2001. It was hoped that these recommendations
would fast track the delivery of tangible outputs that would convince the
end-users of botanical information of the value that the herbaria and botanical
gardens in the region has for producing information bases for conservation
initiatives. Recommendations from the review and workshop were subsequently
implemented in 2001 and 2002. During the Logframe Planning and Budget Allocation
meeting of 2003, the SABONET Steering Committee listed end-user workshops,
threatened plants programmes, and internships (in driving national checklists)
as priority outputs of the Project that will have major impact. None of
these activities were in place when last SABONET evaluated itself (Siebert
et al. 2001). This article aims to report on these three initiatives,
with the success of these programmes measured by self-driven participation
by the SABONET countries.
End-user
Workshops
“A series of national workshops for end-users of botanical information
is seen as the best way to address user needs in the future and forms an
integral part of the Project’s Exit Strategy.”—Timberlake & Paton
(2001), SABONET Midterm Review Recommendations.
A Statement to the WSSD from the Third Global Taxonomy (GTW) Workshop stressed the need for taxonomic institutions to commit themselves to working with governments and civil society to help provide a basis for sustainable development (BioNET-International 2002). The action plan emanating from the GTW suggested that to enable us to achieve this goal, we have to determine the needs of the users of taxonomic information. The very active network of southern African herbaria took on this task and was very pro-active, with the first SABONET workshop to determine the needs of the users of taxonomic information
held six months before the GTW, during February 2002
(Steenkamp & Smith 2002). This workshop formed the basis for what would
become the most active initiative of its kind in Africa.
Previous calculations have estimated that approximately
50 professions make use of taxonomic information (Morin et al. 1988).
This provided SABONET with a good list of possible people to invite to these
workshops. So far we have managed to get together 30 end-users of taxonomic
information during four workshops. During the first workshop in South Africa,
and given the time constraint to invite delegates and implement the workshop,
attendance was better than expected (of the 50 people invited, 34 attended).
The subsequent publishing of the proceedings of this workshop provided a
good working document for other SABONET countries to work with (Steenkamp
& Smith 2002). End-user workshop objectives and the eleven information
and service requirements posed by South African stakeholders have been summarised
by Steenkamp (2002). All electronic versions of invitation letters, worksheets,
background information, and so on were forwarded to the SABONET institutions
to assist the representatives responsible for organising a workshop in country.
Four workshops were conducted in 2002. Six workshops
are planned for 2003 before 30 June. Two of the 2003 workshops will take
place during March. Malawi has already indicated the need to host a second
workshop in 2003 once they have analysed the data obtained from the first
workshop. The SABONET Regional Office hopes to synthesise the results of
all the workshops into a single report for the region, which can be used
in the implementation of future projects.
SABONET is, through its end-user
workshops, contributing substantially towards a better understanding of
what products and services are required by a broad range of users from plant
diversity and information experts, beyond that which is necessary for the
plant sciences. Information obtained from these workshops provide an important
base from which to apply the recommendation of the Midterm Review, by ensuring
that we change priorities to produce new kinds of outputs. This will enable
the great diversity of resources in the plant sciences to remain relevant
for the future.
