Report on the 4th Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM) Awards
The Secretariat organized the 4th clearing-house mechanism Award ceremony on 31st October, 2024.
The clearing-house mechanism established under the CBD promotes technical and scientific cooperation, facilitates information sharing and knowledge exchange, and enables networking and collaboration among parties to catalyze stakeholder engagement at the national level. establishing and maintaining effective national clearing-house mechanisms comes with many logistical, technical, and operational challenges.
Clearing-house mechanism awards were initiated in COP-13th in Cancun and has been continued since then to recognize the important efforts and achievements made by Parties in developing and maintaining their national clearing-house mechanisms.
In July 2024, the Secretariat invited all the Parties to the Convention to submit their applications for the fourth CHM Awards. A Jury consisting of 4 members from the Informal Advisory Group on Technical and Scientific Cooperation was established to identify the award winners. The Jury met at Cambridge UK, from 24th September to 26th September to deliberate over the submission.
The 4th CHM Awards ceremony was presided over Executive Secretary of CBD Ms Astrid Schomaker and attended by over 60 delegates. In her opening speech Ms. Schomaker highlighted the importance of having effective national CHMs towards implementation of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). She also expressed her gratitude to the jury members.
Her speech was followed by the award ceremony during which Parties that had were recognized for their efforts and the Parties that won the award were invited to come and up and accept the certificates and trophies.
Following are the important details related to the 4th CHM Awards
Jury Panel
1.Ms Clarissa Arida of the Philippines:
2. Ms Mukondi Matshusa of South Africa:
3. Mr. Han de Koeijer of Belgium:
4. And Mr. John Tayleur of the United Kingdom:
Award Recipients
Category 1: Certificate of Recognition
1. Government of Cameroon
2. Government of France
3. Government of Kenya
4. Government of Malawi
5. Government of Netherlands
6. Government of Palestine
7. Government of Sri Lanka
Category 2: CHM Awards
Joint 3rd Prize winners
1. Government of Morocco
2. Government of Mozambique
3. Government of Malta
Joint 2nd Prize winners
1. Government of Burundi
2. Government of Philippines.
Winner of CHM Award: Government of Malaysia
A brief note on the Jury Evaluation Criteria for 4th CHM Awards
Parties willing to be considered for the 4th CHM Awards were invited to submit their application by 20th August 2024. The CHM Award application form consisted of 20 questions. Out of these, 13 questions required parties to provide substantive answers across following key three aspects.
1. CHM governance and management
2. CHM portal and website management
3. Content quality and scope
Parties were also requested to share link of their CHM strategy document or their NBSAP, a link of their CHM website or portal and any other relevant document for reference. Each submitted answer was evaluated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score and 5 being the highest.
For the first criteria, the jury unanimously agreed to scrutinize the submitted CHM strategy document or available NBSAPs wherever appropriate to determine the quality and accuracy of the corresponding responses.
For the second criteria, the jury analyzed the national CHM website, focusing on information architecture and overall user experience in terms of usability, information findability and accessibility for knowledge and content types.
For the third criteria, the jury conducted an in-depth review of the websites and meticulously analyzed the available content across all the sections of the website. The Jury browsed through the website looking for evidence related to every content criteria and spent time checking for content recency and relevancy.
At the end of this review, the scores of all submitted applications were plotted on a scale from 1 to 500. Based on their respective rankings, the jury selected the first, second, and third-place winners.
Photographs from the event
