| Cross
Cutting Themes
Cutting
across the four core programmes are three cross cutting themes:
Environmental Education, Gender and HIV/AIDs.
Environmental
education is an important component of community forestry and
alternative livelihoods. Promoting good community forest management
requires knowledge and awareness, which DIN aims to pass on
to community partners. It is also imperative that alternative
livelihoods do not impact negatively on forests and therefore
environmental education will be a major component of the alternative
livelihoods promoted. Community partners have expressed the
desire to learn more about their environment and how to manage
their natural resources, therefore this will also be addressed
in adult literacy classes. Overall, promoting greater environmental
awareness cuts across all of what DIN sets out to achieve in
conserving forests and reducing poverty.
DIN
has had HIV/AIDS as a separate programme and achieved considerable
success in creating awareness about the epidemic. As we all
know, HIV/AIDS not only poses a serious threat to livelihoods
and contributes negatively to poverty reduction, but also undermines
efforts to guarantee productive work to women, youth and men
in rural communities. DIN works with rural people to conserve
forests through alternative livelihoods. It is thus necessary
to strengthen HIV prevention efforts among DIN’s working communities.
The basic fact that community forestry is conserved for the
people means that HIV/AIDS awareness be mainstreamed into all
DIN’s cardinal values.
The
programmes for HIV/AIDS prevention will include information
dissemination, education and gender-awareness. The approach
is intended to help prevent the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic
and lessen the impact on households and poverty in DIN’s working
communities.
Gender
awareness is a core value of DIN, not only when working with
our community partners, but also within the organisation itself.
Our community forestry and alternative livelihoods programmes
require a fundamental understanding of the roles both women
and men play within their communities. Further research is required
on the roles of men and women in natural resource management,
which will feed directly into our project planning. Gender issues
will also be mainstreamed within DIN as an organisation, to
ensure that staff are adequately trained to deal with the challenges
that gender issues can pose.
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