Using the Biodiversity Conservation Gateway: The Case of Nepal

Karl Wurster, USAID/Nepal’s Environment and Energy Team Leader, offers an example of how he used the Gateway to support his mission's work. "The Biodiversity Conservation Gateway contains important publications, documents and tools, which are being regularly updated and augmented," Karl explained. “It is very helpful to have a centralized space for resources that are useful to mission staff in learning and improving their work."

When Karl and his colleagues at USAID's Nepal mission began working on an interagency strategy to combat wildlife trafficking, they knew they needed to understand best practice and also select indicators. They turned to the Biodiversity Conservation Gateway to locate resources to help guide their strategy. Through the Gateway, the team accessed Measuring Efforts to Combat Wildlife Crime: A Toolkit for Improving Action and Accountability, which contains program development suggestions and indicators to help ensure more consistent and comprehensive monitoring and evaluation over the life of their strategy.

In seeking to refine the mission's landscape conservation project strategies, Karl was also able to access knowledge resources related to conservation enterprises and alternative livelihoods. He became a member of the Conservation Enterprises Learning Group and read the systematic review of evidence for alternative livelihoods and conservation outcomes. From this review, he learned that there is a weak evidence base for the effectiveness of alternative livelihoods as a conservation strategy. To strengthen the evidence base, he hired a consultant to review the strategic approaches and to design an impact evaluation that will better capture if and how the approaches are effective.

Kudos to Karl and USAID/Nepal for being knowledge champions!