The Fair, Green and Global Alliance (FGG) Programme

The Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA) in partnership with Action Aid International-Zimbabwe are implementing a 5 year programme titled the Fair, Green and Global Alliance as Southern partner organisations of the Fair, Green and Global Alliance programme.  The Zimbabwe programme is being supported by the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (NIZA) which is a member of the Fair, Green and Global Alliance.  The overall objective of the Fair, Green and Global (FGG) programme is to contribute to poverty reduction and socially just and environmentally sustainable development by building the capacity of civil societies in the South. The programme focuses on enhancing civil society’s capacity in relation to four strategic areas namely; to develop, promote and upscale exemplary policies and practices for sustainable development; to ensure effective corporate accountability measures; to reorient trade and investment policies and to reorient financing policies. The FGG programme seeks to strengthen communities and CSOs and support their involvement in decision-making processes at all levels by contributing to knowledge and skills building and increasing bargaining and negotiating capacities.

In Zimbabwe, the Fair, Green and Global Alliance programme has 2 major objectives. Firstly, the programme is meant to enable local communities and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to defend their rights and livelihoods and to participate in strategy development and decision making processes. Secondly, the programme is aimed at strengthening legal education and advocacy on environmental, economic, social and cultural rights (EESCR). In that respect the programme is meant to strengthen the watchdog role of communities and CSOs so that they are able to demand accountability from government and private businesses.

In order to achieve the objectives of this programme some of the activities that will be implemented during the next 5 years include; public education workshops and meetings in mining communities, policy dialogue meetings with legislators, outreach visits to link legislators and communities affected by mining operations, human rights defenders activities, advocacy activities on the constitutional reform process, investigative research on extractive industries, media outreach programmes and seminars, monitoring and analysis of national and local authority budgets and extractive and natural resources sector  exchange visits in the SADC region.

The expected outcomes include; increased awareness of community rights over natural resources, increased ability of community activists to call government and mining companies to account over natural resources revenue, increased capacity of the media to report, profile and expose human rights abuses and corruption in the extractive sector, improved transparency and accountability in government and private companies’ operations in the natural resources sector, enhanced capacity of legislators to play a representative, oversight and legislative role in the  natural resources sector and increased budget allocations to community projects.