Forests help fight climate change, but they are under threat. Stemming runaway deforestation requires collective and individual action, starting with indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs).
That is why CIF established the Dedicated Grant Mechanism for IPLCs (DGM) ten years ago. The DGM aims to enhance the role of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in protecting the forests they depend on. One way of doing that is to ensure the knowledge gained by IPLCs is shared more widely between communities relying on forests.
This knowledge-sharing work will be accelerated by the launch of the new DGM Global Learning Fellowship. The Fellow aims to strengthen and promote storytelling and facilitate learning and knowledge exchange between IPLCs. This will help IPLCs to learn from and potentially adapt one another’s best practices in DGM project implementation to their own contexts.
The Fellowship will be centered around themes and expertise emerging from DGM country projects, including agroforestry, climate smart agriculture, community enterprises, gender, social inclusion, land governance and more. Nine four month, part-time Fellowships will be awarded, during which each Fellow will receive up to $2,500 to carry out specific activities between April and July 2021.
At the end of their projects, the Fellows will present on their experiences and results in knowledge sharing sessions open to all IPLC community members. They will also create tools to share these findings with their communities and networks, so the benefit of the projects could be multiplied.
IPLCs who are actively engaged with DGM country projects are eligible to apply, as long as they are not active staff or members of NSC, NEA or GCSE. All DGM stakeholders and non-DGM IPLC community members will be invited to attend and participate in the virtual knowledge sharing sessions.
The $80 million DGM is part of CIF’s Forest Investment Program. You can find out more here.