Ensuring equitability and sustainability concerns

Ensuring equitability and sustainability of the programme efforts is a key challenge. This needs to work out a concrete plan and design activities so that the target communities continue to gain income and better livelihoods from the beekeeping value chain even after the programme is over. Various activities identified to address the issue of sustainability are as follows:

• Building on the existing physical and human resources can contribute a lot to enhancing people’s livelihoods in the pilot villages. The initiatives plan to do this by engaging the economically active population especially the rural unemployed youth in income generating activities focused around bees and pollination; organising them into groups and associations; improving their skills and capacity in improved methods of production through training, improving access to information, technology and providing necessary inputs and market linkages. Women and other disadvantage groups will be especially encouraged to participate in the programme activities by organising activities and events in a way more suitable to them.
• Building and strengthening community-based institutions such as associations and cooperatives through trainings/exposure visits, provision of key equipment and other support such as facilitating access to technology, access to information, access to finance and access to market.
• Better leveraging and convergence with ongoing projects and related government schemes help in extending the intervention from pilots to whole landscape and also for its continuation and sustainability in the long run. This will be done through regular communication and sharing of impact/learning with government officials by organising meetings, field visits to pilot sites.
• Planting trees/ plants that also provide nectar and pollen to bees around the house and the common village land, and including plants and trees that also provide forage for bees in government plantation schemes will help in strengthening beekeeping in the area. This will not only help in beekeeping development but will also contribute to better ecosystem health and provisioning of quality ecosystem services.