About This Project

The Orange Knowledge Programme is a Dutch global development programme, available in 53 developing countries and managed by Nuffic, a Dutch non-profit organisation for Internationalisation in education. Launched mid-2017, it aims to have provided tens of thousands with the possibility to change their future through education and training by mid 2022.    

We applied with a Dutch South African consortium consisting of Behold, The Experience Factory, Embedding Impact and ESA to support 8 talents in a tailor-made SIM Grad Programme for sustainable climate smart conservation agriculture. The aim of the training programme is to fulfill an urgent and increasing local and global need for professionals in Social & Environmental Impact Management. 8 Unemployed graduates (with qualifying degrees) will be trained in the basic methodology of Social Impact Management, with a focus on sustainable climate smart conservation agriculture. Subsequently each one of them will be deployed for a 11-months internship at those communities where ESA will be implementing its unique model of building sustainable and profitable biodiversity/wildlife-based value chain businesses. In doing so, we address rural livelihoods, food security, employment creation, enterprise development, and land restoration (a foundation of the model) for local communities.

The training programme we designed focuses on understanding the current social, socio-economic and environmental situation at each site (baseline studies) and in due course it will measure the progress made towards the social, socio-economic and environmental objectives (impact measurement), in order to ensure that impact is maximized.