61 including their socio-demographic profiling and specialty. When compared with Burkill and Haniff, the study shows that traditional indigenous knowledge still exists, though it is not widely practiced especially among younger generations. Hence, there is an urgent need to document and promote the knowledge but at the same time ensure safety and efficacy of these practices. Capacity Building and Dissemination Though there are active community-based health traditions, quality, safety, efficacy, rational use, and lack of systematic documentation of these practices remain major challenges in the field of traditional health knowledge. This indicates that there is an urgent need for improving capacities of local knowledge holders as well as other stakeholders, such as community-based organisations, and educational institutions. This has led to the creation of capacity development modules and programmes for various stakeholders such as healers, researchers, civil society organisations and policymakers through the RCE programme. A key focus of these training programmes has been to build capacity of traditional health practitioners and researchers in the area of traditional medicine and to deliberate on the role of traditional medicine in the emerging sustainable healthcare systems. This includes identification, documentation, assessment and promotion of safe and effective traditional health practices for community health care. The programmes are targeted to revive traditional knowledge in local communities related to health and nutrition for addressing complex community health needs and recognising their roles and highlighting the silent contributions of traditional health practitioners in health care. The capacity building programmes incorporate diverse perspectives of researching and engaging with traditional medicine, including the pharmaceutical perspective on herbal product standardisation and the social and anthropological perspectives of documenting and researching indigenous medicinal knowledge. Themes like Technology and Biodiversity Products; Environment, Policy and Biomedical Sciences; and Social Policy and Alternative Medicine are also part of the focus. These programmes have created more awareness about the importance of documenting traditional medicinal knowledge in more systematic ways. They have also impacted other RCEs through regional and global networking and generated new partnerships among RCEs for focused research projects in the area of community health and nutrition. Another awareness programme conducted by the RCE on identification of herbal plants by young children, “MAI KENAI POKOK HERBA”, involved four kindergartens and one preschool in the Balik Pulau district of Penang. The purpose of the programme is to promote awareness on the identification and use of herbal plants among pupils between four to six years of age. The programme was organised by research officers and students from Universiti Sains Malaysia. The importance of conserving herbal plants in relation to biodiversity were also emphasised in the programme. The programme used interactive learning activities to create awareness among children about the importance of herbal plants. Activities included games, singing, dancing, the use of a mascot “Mat Herba”, and through hands-on planting of herbal plants at nursery and school compounds. The programme has created linkages among schools, younger generations in the community and the villagers as a whole. Challenges and Results This programme was based on exploratory and action-oriented research. The exploratory research brought together researchers from different fields and specialisations, making the findings more interesting and rich. Networking with communities through a participatory approach to research was the foundation of the programme. The programme is a continuation of a previous project of revitalising home gardens in the district of Balik Pulau, Penang. The main challenge in applying this approach was the difficulty in sustaining documentation in a situation where there was a severe lack of financial resources. All of the programmes have different levels of evaluations, which indicate that transformation from mere fundamental research to action-oriented research actually makes a major difference in the communities. These differences may be incremental, but they also have potential. For example, the development of more than 30 local products through the torch ginger programme indicates how indigenous knowledge of herbal plants can be transformed into high value-added commercial products 7
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
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