Bushmeat-free Eastern Africa Network (BEAN)

In 2008, FOS staff taught a 5-day course in adaptive management at Mweka College of Wildlife Management in Tanzania. This was part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service-funded MENTOR Fellowship post-graduate program on addressing bushmeat in eastern Africa. Since then, the 8 MENTOR fellows have completed the graduate program and continue to use the Open Standards and Miradi in their bushmeat mitigation work. To further and expand the regional efforts to address bushmeat in eastern Africa, these MENTOR fellows and their advisors began the Bushmeat-free Eastern Africa Network (BEAN).
As an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborative network, BEAN seeks to collaboratively raise awareness, focus attention, share information, analyze, evaluate and report on trends, and leverage resources to build local partnerships to implement grassroots solutions that directly address bushmeat exploitation problems affecting protected and surrounding areas in Eastern Africa. BEAN held its first strategic planning workshop in Kampala, Uganda in December 2009. FOS helped to facilitate this meeting, introduced the Open Standards, and led participants through the initial strategic planning process, building on the draft conceptual model, results chains, and monitoring plan developed by MENTOR fellows. FOS continues to work with BEAN to help establish a functioning and effective partnership for combating bushmeat in eastern Africa.