Cross Cutting Themes
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Cutting across the four core programmes are three cross cutting themes: Environmental Education, Gender and HIV/AIDs. Environmental Education 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.HIV / AIDS 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 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. |
