Low-cost biodigesters are more than biogas producers – they hold tremendous untapped potential for wastewater treatment. Jaime Martí Herrero reflects on a project that took him from a metropolitan slaughterhouse in Ecuador to Indigenous communities in the Amazon.
Advocacy and Replication of Community Organisers in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asian members of the Hydro Empowerment Network have expressed a strong need to strengthen the local human resources – the so-called community organisers – who are at the heart of their work, by providing them with better support and increasing their numbers. The suggested solution for meeting this need is to collectively engage the micro hydro community organisers in the regions.
This WISIONS exchange programme with Green Empowerment aimed to enhance the community organisers in documentation and media management, to identify processes to provide guidance and training to new community organisers, and to use the findings and videos developed to advocate for community-centred approaches to micro-hydro power.
These aims were achieved through:
- the implementation of media training and workshops to enable community organisers at both practitioner and community level to become creators of cultural content in a “media world”, with results to be shared online with a global community of stakeholders;
- the facilitation of a workshop with existing community organisers to determine how HPNET can strengthen their current work and establish new community organisers; and
- the implementation of a research initiative to identify the specific needs and opportunities of partner organisations with regards to their community programmes.
The exchange activities provided an opportunity to gain further insight into the unique community organising styles and philosophies of each of the organsations involved: IBEKA (Indonesia), Tonibung (Malaysia), REAM (Myanmar), SIBAT and Yamog (the Philippines).