CARPE Regional Inception Workshop Yaounde February 07 09

CARPE Regional Inception Workshop Yaounde, February 07 -09, 2007 General Objectives, Working Methodology and Expected Outputs By Kenneth ANGU Program Manager, CARPE Program

§ Major objectives will be to: § clarify the relationships, responsibilities and activities of each of the CARPE partners (landscape consortia, US Federal Agencies, WRI, IUCN) in order to improve collaboration within the CARPE program; § this will help individual partners explain to host governments, other stakeholders and their own staff the expected outputs of the CARPE program.

§ present the reformed CARPE program in the context of the US Government efforts to reform foreign assistance and how this affects the expected/planned CARPE results, targets and achievements; § Familiarise participants with the changes and modifications in the CARPE reporting system in order to meet these new overarching requirements;

§ explain to CARPE partners the new role of IUCN in the next phase of CARPE; § Coordinating role; § Specific roles of the CARPE Focal Points, the CARPE Country Teams; and § how the CARPE Small Grants program is expected to advance CARPE objectives in good natural resources governance.

§ The workshop objective will be attained through a combination of presentations from USAID/CARPE and other workshop participants and discussion sessions following presentations; § These discussion sessions will be directed in order to come up with tangible outputs in the form of suggestions and recommendations for specific activities and inter-institutional collaborations.

§ A series of parallel working groups will be formed on key thematic areas related to landscape natural resource management and policy advocacy in order to come up with recommendations; § These groups will present the results of their work for feedback from the plenary sessions and a concrete output will be produced in the form of a list of key recommendations.

§ An additional component of the workshop will consist of the presentation of case studies of the actual implementation of land use planning in selected landscapes; § These will help provide common understanding of the landscape planning process and how to use the landscape planning guides and macro zone planning guides; § These case studies will also be used to focus discussion on the key challenges and solutions to implementing land use planning and needed backstopping from the US Forest Service.

§ A final theme to be discussed involves the production of the next State of the Forest Report; § This involves two key questions. The first is a review, discussion and list of recommendations concerning strategies for harmonization of data collection for the next SOF; § The second involves making proposals for topics for the SOF as well as a timeline for accomplishing key needed activities and recommendations for assigning responsibilities.

§ An important side activity on Saturday morning is a field visit to a participatory indigenous tree domestication project that focuses on improving farmer livelihoods; § This activity is an example of CARPE’s emphasis on a people-centered approach to conservation via the promotion of alternative livelihoods that reduce environmental threats.

§ Thanks