Untitled Document In mid 2024 - The Association of Protected Areas Management Organizations came out swinging against PACT, the Protected Areas Conservation Trust. They were concerned about the revision of two pieces of legislation and asked whether the role of APAMO co-managers was being changed.
Well, the PM brokered a truce and months later both sides sat at the same table to sign a strategic partnership agreement.
PACT has agreed to provide a total of $319,000 in funding support for APAMO and its members. They told us how this money will be used to meet the objectives of this partnership.
Abner Castaneda, Executive Director, PACT
"Today we are very happy to sign a strategic partnership agreement with APAMO, the Association of Protected Areas Management Organisation. That really puts a good way forward in how together we are building The capacity of our community based organisations that manage protected areas across the country. For quite some time now we have been working on developing this framework making sure that it is structured in a way that does two things it provides the support that our CBO's need within the protected areas system in Belize but also that it provides a platform for us to think about a longer term pattern ship moving forward because as was said in the signing event just a while ago you know the CBO's are very critical in the protected areas system framework and the work that they do is built on passion and their love for community and their love for the environment and so we are trying to find ways in which we can provide structure around how we support that and how we empower our community based organisations moving forward."
Jose Perez, Executive Director, APAMO
"APAMO is comprised of 17 members, we have ten members who are considered grass roots local communities, these are the ones that this partnership will target, they are the weaker members of our family. And they are the ones who have weak capacities. The module that we implement is that whilst we improve the resource centre with experts. These experts will support the smaller groups so for example rather than a small committee group hiring a business development person or a marketing person we include that capacity and expertise within our UCRC and we provide that service to our members so in summary what we do is provide technical and financial oversight to these smaller CBO's while a big organisation like Belize Audubon could hire its finance officer its own park managers its own business development officer the CBO's are far from that so the approach that we have is we do it in a consolidated way. We have that expertise centralised at our resource centre and we provide it to more than one CBO and so this is what this partnership is doing."
APAMO represents a number of Non governmental and community based organizations which seek to ensure the sustainable use and protection of Belize's natural resources.
