"Through the support of GEF SGP for BirdLife Botswana's project, the NGO has empowered local citizens, particularly members of rural communities, to make a contribution to biodiversity monitoring and thereby advance Botswana's commitment towards meeting the obligations of the Convention on Biological Diversity. This has been achieved by building local capacity on bird survey methodologies and identification, through a series of training workshops. A major outcome has been having a total of 370 'ordinary' citizen-scientists committed to undertaking bird counts along fixed transects twice annually, as compared to 28 volunteers three years before, when the scheme was introduced and lacked funding."