Workshops

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) underpins any project seeking to foster learning, adaptive management, and understanding the true impact on people and biodiversity. When applied effectively, MEL becomes more than a reporting tool, and it becomes a driver of reflection, adaptation, and continuous improvement, directly strengthening the resilience and effectiveness of conservation livelihoods projects. This workshop will highlight innovative MEL approaches that are successful and facilitate discussions around challenges in real-world project scenarios to promote cross-organisational learnings.  

Conservation Livelihoods projects aim to shift power and resources to local communities, ensuring that those who live closest to nature also benefit from its protection. However, gender, age and disabilities are often key drivers of people who have been, and remain, marginalised. Achieving true inclusivity requires tailoring interventions to create equitable opportunities to all.  Participants will learn how to intentionally adapt project approaches to be more inclusive and how celebrating diversity can strengthen community autonomy, foster social equity, and build more resilient partnerships between people and nature.

This workshop introduces the Green MSD framework, a new approach that embeds climate and nature at the heart of market systems development alongside poverty reduction. Recognising that climate change and biodiversity loss are rooted in market dynamics that incentivise unsustainable growth, the framework focuses on transforming how markets function, so they sustain the natural systems on which economies and livelihoods depend. Participants will explore how this integrated approach can enable markets to deliver better outcomes for people, climate, and nature.

Limited access to affordable, appropriate financial services, such as savings, credit, insurance, and digital payments, constrains livelihoods and economic participation, particularly for underserved groups. This workshop focuses on one of these groups: young women, aged 15-24 who are among the most excluded. Research has shown that well-designed financial inclusion initiatives can help them successfully navigate life transitions. Participants in the workshop will explore practical approaches for serving young women with financial services and consider how to integrate these into Conservation Livelihood projects.

Challenges within the conservation and development sectors are often behavioural at their core, making behaviour change a priority cross-cutting issue across all conservation livelihood projects. Many organisations deliver awareness campaigns, but many challenges, such as unsustainable practices or overharvesting, come from behavioural, social and economic factors, rather than a lack of knowledge. This workshop will provide attendees with a greater understanding of behavioural science and highlight evidence-based tools to support behaviour change interventions to lead to more effective, sustainable results for both people and nature.