Capacity Building in Kabul
It was a real pleasure to return to Kabul for the second training visit in the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants’ (CMEP) 3 year DelPHE project with Kabul University Faculty of Science. It had been six months since our last visit in October 2010, but I was pleased to see that the students still recognised myself and my colleague Tony Miller!
In our absence we had delivered online training via our DelPHE project website, to maintain the student’s development and to keep them engaged in the project.
This distance learning has surprisingly been a great success. During the first of our 6 days, we pored over the assignments the students had completed since October. These focussed on introducing them to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) – both of which are global agreements to conserve biodiversity, which Afghanistan has signed along with 192 other countries.
The overall aim of our project ‘Improving Afghan capacity for biodiversity science and conservation’ is to train biology students from Kabul University (KU) to conduct plant biodiversity research and conservation. Whilst many may think Afghanistan has more pressing problems, capacity building in the environmental sciences is an urgent task. As a largely rural country which faces significant environmental issues, Afghanistan requires civil society expertise to secure the rich biodiversity which acts as the resource base for all Afghans.
During our visit in June, the bulk of our work focussed on the fundamental task of identifying plant biodiversity. Unfortunately Afghanistan lacks the resources and skills to accurately identify plant species. As we repeatedly told the students, without identification there can be no conservation – because you cannot identify key areas for conservation, without knowing first what you have to conserve!
These essential skills can only be learned from practical experience, so we spent the bulk of our time concentrating on handling plants and examining the characters which allow us to identify them. This involved dissecting and drawing plants from the beautiful British Council garden, using the specimens in the KU Herbarium to describe plant species and collecting and photographing plant species during ‘field work’ on the grounds of the KU campus.
Whilst being lots of fun, this work also fulfills international obligations of the United Kingdom under the CBD. As a signatory of CBD, the UK has committed to ‘the development and strengthening of national capabilities [in developing countries], by means of human resources development and institution building’ (Article 18). Conversely, our student training, and the outputs that they will produce will also contribute towards Afghan commitments to plant conservation under the newly re-formulated GSPC.
CMEP are currently seeking funds to supplement those provided by DelPHE for both capacity building visits to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and for fieldwork training, either in Afghanistan or in neighbouring countries. This would not only generate more face to face contact with our students, but it would provide them with the necessary practical experience to contribute significantly to environmental conservation activities in Afghanistan.
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