Deadline: 13-Mar-22
The Siemenpuu Foundation has announced a call for project proposals to support the biocultural rights of indigenous communities and their biocultural life-heritages as adapted to their local environments.
The aim of this Siemenpuu Foundation’s funding scheme on Biocultural Rights is to strengthen the realisation of biocultural rights of indigenous communities. The concept of Biocultural Rights recognizes each community’s identity, culture, governance system, spirituality and way of life, as connected to the community’s landscape by local customs to steward its lands, waters and forests. Such rights are increasingly recognized and supported by international law.
The Foundation call for project concept papers to strengthen indigenous communities’ biocultural diversity and their rights to live in ways which do not threaten or weaken biodiversity and ecosystems but allow them to regenerate, supporting the implementation of internationally acknowledged traditional rights. The funded projects are intended to support indigenous communities’ rights to enjoy and sustain the regeneration of local ecosystems belonging to their life-heritage.
With the projects to be funded, they aim at promoting and strengthening the resilience of such ways of life, by which communities’ cultural diversity sustains biodiversity and likewise, is sustained by biodiversity according to:
- How communities can be supported to express, document, assert or strengthen their diverse local biocultural life-heritages so that they can protect the traditional rights recognised for them and sustain local diversity of life.
- How they can best use such domestically or internationally recognised local rights to maintain and develop ways of life and activities, which make their distinctive life and livelihood sustainable, dignified and self-determined.
Funding Information
- The range of project funding is 30,000 – 100,000 Euros, depending on the nature of the proposed projects (like number of project implementing partners).
- Maximum project duration is 24 months, starting between July 2022 and early 2023.
- Projects supported by Siemenpuu must include a minimum of 10 % self-financing counted from the Siemenpuu grant. It may consist of cash, voluntary work, and/or donated goods.
Eligible country: Kenya (with potential Eastern African regional linkages)
Criteria
- The legal holders of the supported projects should be registered local civil society organisations based in Kenya. However, funded projects may include elements of regional cooperation and international advocacy, considering that the problems and challenges are regionally shared and potential solutions could be mutually strengthening and promote ethnic and regional stability based on sustainable life-heritages.
- Special emphasis in the projects should be on the rights of women, who are often carriers of sustainable heritage in their communities.
For more information, visit https://www.siemenpuu.org/en/news/call-project-proposals-biocultural-rights-kenya-dl-13-march-2022