BBP Project holds midyear review towards a successful conclusion

The midyear review, which tackled a wide range of activities taken up by the partners in implementing, managing, and monitoring the project accomplishments, served as a venue for the country coordinators from the project sites in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Viet Nam, as well as representatives from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, GFA Consulting Group GmbH, and ACB to share their own activities, challenges and plans for the BBP project for the remaining months.

Enabling communities to be economically productive while ensuring biodiversity conservation was underscored by ACB’s Executive Director Dr. Theresa Mundita S. Lim. She highlighted two of the BBP Project’s achievements for the year – the presentation of its Policy Proposal during the 28th Meeting of the ASEAN Working Group On Nature Conservation and Biodiversity, and the signing of the Local Subsidy Contracts in Cambodia. Dr. Lim shared her hopes that with this project, biodiversity can be further accepted as a mainstream subject matter, and that the biodiversity-based products from the ASEAN Member States will be recognized worldwide.
While the review led to assessing of what have been achieved and what will be done in the remaining months, it also looked into ways how biodiversity-based value chain development can be made sustainable as the project concludes next year.

After discussions, the main tasks that have to be carried out for the remainder of the project period are to collect and present the success stories of the BBP pilot models in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Viet Nam, as well as support the mainstreaming of policies on biodiversity-based value chain development in the ASEAN. This includes building up the support system by enabling partners and strengthening knowledge management to ensure that the biodiversity-based value chain development is promoted as a means to improve income-generating and biodiversity conservation capacities of communities in the buffer zones of protected areas. 
The project also took up recommendations from the 28th Meeting of the ASEAN Working Group on Nature Conservation and Biodiversity held in Seam Reap, Cambodia, where ACB was requested to further support the capacity building of ASEAN stakeholders in biodiversity value chain development. Further trainings and learning exchanges will be organized by the BBP project within the coming months. 
- B. Schlegel and N.E. Lopez