Chris Cheupe, April 2018

SPACES spent lots of effort in order to disseminate information with the hope of improving the wellbeing of the people in the study communities.  Impact activities which aim at bringing change at the community have been done using both top down (high level workshops) and bottom up (community feedback meeting and dialogue) approaches.

With regard to these impact activities the communities have seemingly done a lot which have remained undocumented. Due to this, it is difficult to gauge the progress and challenges faced by the community members in their effort to apply the knowledge generated from the impact activities.

SPACES project has collected data in the Kenyan coastal sites including Kongowea, Vanga, Shimoni areas and Tsunza. The project has also conducted feedback meeting with these communities with an aim of disseminating its key findings. Apart from generously sharing data with the team members, the community continued with the […]

In Kenya, SPACES team members have led community dialogues in the local communities where SPACES research was gathered. The dialogues were a way for SPACES to thank the communities for their participation in the research process and for the community members to discuss the research findings amongst themselves and what the implications are for the community. The communities came up with several suggestions and solutions to some of the key issues they face.

The suggestions included 1.) capacity building on aspects like alternative livelihood activities, women’s empowerment, entrepreneurship skills, alternative fishing techniques, mangrove conservation, 2.) support on fish storage facilities, improving infrastructure and 3.) access to financial institutions, markets, education, and mangrove licenses. The suggestions from the communities in Kenya were taken back to key stakeholders in the region including, Kenyan Fisheries Services, Act Change Transform (ACT), Youth Enterprise Development Fund, Kenya […]

In Kenya, the SPACES field team is conducting community dialogues in the coastal communities of Vanga, Jimbo, Tsunza, Mkwiro, Shimoni, and Kongowea. The team has returned from the first three sites and has reflected on the process and has recently departed for the next site, Mkwiro.

During the community dialogues, the team is presenting some of SPACES key findings and following up on questions which the community members asked during the community feedback last summer. The objective of the dialogues is twofold. The first objective is to share the findings with the communities in hope to stimulate conversation, understand the communities’ interpretations of the findings, and identify possible actions that can be taken in the communities and by development actors. The second objective is to reflect and learn from the dialogue experience and to continually improve the dialogues from site to site. In the end we hope to be able […]

The SPACES project has received a supplementary grant from SwedBIO to conduct community dialogues which are aimed at providing an engagement at the community level allowing an interface between perspectives, understandings and visions from community and higher levels as informed by SPACES research.

A fruitful planning meeting was held in Mombasa, Kenya from 15th to 16th November, 2016. The meeting engaged key people from both Kenya and Mozambique (more…)