Solomon Islands National Information Strategy to empower all communities to better manage their marine resources.

The National Information Strategy to empower all communities to better manage their marine resources is a critical component to upscale community-based resource management in line with the Solomon Islands Community Based Coastal and Marine Resource Management Strategy (2021-2025). Given the challenges of limited resources and capacity and the need to engage with diverse and hard to reach communities, the overarching goal of upscaling CBRM strategies is to find cost-effective information pathways to empower all communities to better manage their marine resources across the region. There are five objectives which create enabling conditions to reach 100 percent of Solomon Island coastal communities, namely: (I) to provide essential information to all coastal communities and stakeholders regarding fisheries, resource management, ecosystems and adaptation to climate change and other threats, (II) to support communities and stakeholders to become organized and committed to make better resource management decisions that address livelihoods, food security and coastal environment concerns/issues, (III) to build and sustain lines of communications between communities and stakeholders, as well as between communities and provincial and national governments, (IV) to build institutional capacity, particularly in the host-government, to implement an information strategy beyond the life of this project, and (V) to elevate the value of investing in CBRM and provide recommendations to the government and other key partners to direct investment towards the most effective communications and outreach activities to maximise sector capacity and resources.
This Strategy is intended to empower coastal communities to diagnose problems and identify appropriate local management solutions. Five key target audiences are critical to reach for successful CBRM, which are fishers (men, women, and youth); Traditional Chiefs and Community Leaders; Traditional Resource Owners (of fishing grounds); Village/Community Development Groups; and fish buyers and sellers (individuals and businesses). This Strategy aims at finding cost-effective information pathways through four broad categories that will guide activity selection and tool development, which include broadcast through media and social media; extensive dissemination through both product development and distribution; targeted dissemination to key target audiences; and direct engagement by supporting site-based patterns. This Strategy stresses on the importance of providing input and receiving feedback to improve provincial and national decisionmaking on resource management, to ensure decision-making is responsive to challenges and needs on the ground and ensure equitable benefits sharing. In addition, a full monitoring, evaluation, and learning framework will be developed as part of the implementation, and this framework will focus on monitoring and evaluating key impacts areas.