Wisdom of Life

Maldives Environmental Management Workshop for Local Facilitators

The Maldives Environmental Management Program, funded by World Bank, has been in full swing this week on Naifaru! We’ve been pleased to welcome facilitators from Live & Learn to be running a five-day workshop, Training of Trainers (TOT), to create facilitators to work throughout the northern atolls. Representatives have come from Noonu, Raa, and Baa atolls to attend this workshop, joining Naifaru and Hinnavaru-based attendees from Lhavianyi atoll, for a total of ten participants. These participants will, over the course of the week, develop the knowledge and skills necessary to become environmental education facilitators themselves, and will be in a position to disseminate this knowledge throughout their home atolls over eighteen selected islands.

The training, run by Aminath Thifla, Adam Fazil, and Zuhudul Haqqu from Live & Learn, and overseen by delegates from EPA, MRC, and MEMP project, is designed to provide these community facilitators with intensive training in how to deliver and effectively use training materials and resources that have been developed by Live & Learn. These materials cover the four core training modules of Terrestrial fauna and flora, Coral Reef Ecosystems, Erosion and beach Management and Waste management, having been identified as important subsets for the Maldives in environmental awareness and monitoring. This week’s training will teach these new facilitators both how to use these resources and how to train members of their respective communities to use them also – in the aim of creating a grassroots education system, where individuals within the community have the power and resources to train others.

This training is part of a larger ongoing MEMP project, funded by the World Bank, designed to take a more regional approach to environmental education. This is based on firstly strengthening capacity at atoll-level through this TOT workshop, then by these trainers sustaining this capacity locally through community education, and ultimately empowering these communities by giving them a direct link to their trainers. In the next month, these new facilitators will take these resources and new understanding of their environment, our environment, back to their islands and hold community education classes, as our new local experts will be doing right here on Naifaru.

We will be keeping you updated of when our new facilitators will be teaching the modules to keen residents of Naifaru who will be learning ways of taking the preservation of our natural environment into their own hands.

 

 

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