Two young men passing a seedling hand to hand on a slope
Capacity Development · Youth Leadership

Skills, Learning, and Capacity Development

Young people learn the work by doing it, across every initiative Kenono runs, and take on leadership as they go.

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The approach

Youth capacity-building is an integral part of Kenono’s work.

We place young people at the forefront of our cooperative development, field implementation, and documentation work to support livelihood generation and the transfer of technical ecological knowledge (TEK).

How young people take part

  • Internships. Short placements on running projects, where the work is the training: field surveys, records, the nursery and planting seasons, and the reporting that follows.
  • Small fellowships. Longer support for a young person to carry a piece of work of their own inside one of Kenono’s initiatives.
  • Training with the village institutions. Camera trapping, wildlife monitoring, and documentation training run with Biodiversity Management Committees and the community protection forces.
  • Facilitating for younger children. Running sessions at the Sendenyu Biodiversity Education Experience Centre, including the Eyes of Tomorrow programme.

What it leads to

  • Opportunities for leadership. People who start as participants go on to run sessions, lead survey teams, and speak for a programme in front of the village institutions.
  • Skills with work attached locally. Enterprise, nursery, monitoring, and documentation skills that have somewhere to go in Tseminyu.
  • Knowledge that carries forward. The documentation work puts young people in front of elders while that knowledge can still be recorded.
  • A women’s leadership programme, coming. Women-specific leadership skilling is in preparation across the same initiatives.
Internships and fellowships

Kenono places interns and fellows in our biodiversity and cooperative programmes.

We create formal internship and fellowship opportunities to introduce youth to the workplace and provide hands-on training.

Biodiversity conservation

Biodiversity documentation and monitoring

Camera trapping and wildlife monitoring, species surveys, and the fieldwork behind a village’s People’s Biodiversity Register, carried out with the committee that holds it.

Biodiversity Management Committees
Programming for children and youth

Biodiversity education

Preparing and running sessions for schoolchildren and youth groups at the centre in Sendenyu, and helping with the festivals and camps built around them.

Sendenyu centre
Fellowships and hands-on training

Skills development at the cooperatives

Hands-on training in the Zunpha cooperative’s enterprise units, from garments and printing to poultry, custom hiring, and carpentry, alongside the members who run them.

Cooperative Development
Coming soon

Women’s leadership skilling

A women-specific leadership programme running across the same initiatives, from the seed bank and the enterprise units to the village committees.

Coming soon
Creating space for youth leadership

Kenono creates opportunities for youth education and empowerment across our programmes.

In addition to providing formal opportunities, we centre youth engagement, perspective, and leadership in key areas of our work.

Biodiversity education

Sendenyu Biodiversity Education Experience Centre

An intergenerational learning space in the community reserve, home to the Eyes of Tomorrow programme.

Learn more
Agrobiodiversity

Climate-Resilient Seed Collectives

A training and learning hub as much as a store, with a demonstration garden and an exhibition hall, built with partners who train seed bank managers across Asia.

Learn more
Community forest

Community Conserved Areas (CCAs)

The forests villages govern themselves, where monitoring training, exposure visits, and knowledge exchange take place.

Learn more
Two young people planting seedlings along a bankPlanting out along the bank
Young men loading seedlings onto a truck at the nurseryLoading out for the planting season
Field notes

The training ground.

Nursery, slope, and field, in the seasons when the work happens.

Young people passing seedlings down a flight of steps beside a nursery01Seedlings down the steps, hand to hand
A group walking a planted field on a hillside02Walking the field with the team
Villagers and young people planting across a cleared slope03A planting day, all hands on the slope