By: Nthati Moerane
Maseru
Nature4water, Regeneration of Landscapes and Livelihoods (ROLL) through Sentebale in collaboration with Avocado Vision met to provide progress presentations and discuss inception reports on the project to improve specified infrastructure in Lesotho.
Through ROLL, Avocado Vision seeks to identify gaps and provide valuable information for developing appropriate interventions within selected landscapes and households. This includes conducting research across various levels of progress so as to fully diagnose realized hindrances.
The project’s objective is to ensure that rural communities adopt transformational practices for regenerated landscapes and sustainable livelihoods, leading to improved nutrition and adaptation to climate change. This main objective is underpinned by four outcomes being changed resource use practises, reduction of environmental degradation, improved livelihoods, and the establishment of a facility and a fund for landscape regeneration. In their presentation, ROLL provided a Fund Design Report which showed different sectors funding the roll project. These include World Food Project, Southern African Developing Countries, Government Of Lesotho and others.
According to Letsatsi Lesuoa, Roll Fund Design specialist, ROLL as a fund of its kind cannot be talked about without incorporating the ministry of finance, and the Central Bank of Lesotho (CBL), which are both vital for the success of the entire project, inclusive of the design of the fund, and ensuring alliance with rules and regulations that govern the financial sectors.
Kerry Kopke, Nature4water’s representative, says ROLL should be a fund account and maintain its current institutional and governance structure to manage pilot programmes. The long term intention is for ROF to become an institutional fund as a separate legal entity to enable its permanency and, its mechanism for channelling funds and, consequently enabling the achievement of its objectives beyond the existence of the Lesotho ROLL project.
Also, the optimal legal structure for the Lesotho ROF to support its long-term operations is a combination of a public and private entity and therefore both options are viable.
ROLL’s two main components are regeneration of landscape and livelihoods and how people interact with their environment in order to support their livelihoods. In order to achieve these functions, a generation of resources is realized through Sentebale and Avocado Vision, as catalysts developed by ROLL to innovatively impact ways of utilizing sustainable and natural resources.
While Nature4water will assist to develop paths that will be financing the activities which Sentebale and Avocado Vision will be executing in assessment for natural resource users, villagers and different group users on an array of business cases.
Moraoetsi Rakuoane, representative of Sentebale and Avocado Vision, says the execution of the project will kick-start with a comprehensive approach to community engagement and mobilization, and also a participatory action plan facilitating dynamic and participatory planning sessions. As a coalition building service provider, a key responsibility is to establish and support regeneration coalitions, achieve ROLL project objectives and develop common regeneration coalition (RC) visions. Again, they will create regeneration plans, develop graduation model, and lastly codify ROLL processes.
Sentebale as an organization was founded in 2006 by Prince Harry of England and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho with the aim of helping young people address socio-economic challenges faced in Lesotho.
Avocado Vision is a South African based social impact development company, founded in 1996. Its aim is to empower communities and landscapes by implementing scalable, cost effective and impactful socio-economic development solutions. Objectives for this company include contextualizing analysis, approaching expert teams to phase approaches, deliverables and timelines, and the state of readiness.