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