 Okay, we can start the meeting. Dear participants, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to wish you a warm welcome to this online international conference, co-organized by the Center for International Forestry Research, the World Agroforestry Center, and the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Office of International Forestry Research. I would like to ask you to introduce yourself. I'm Dr. Dona Wano, the original office of KT Aunga. I'm a community based forestry and we really hope you will appreciate the changes that we will have from the previous meeting. We have invited around the table people with great experience and we're quite sure that we'll learn enough from what they have been doing on the forestry around the world. Without spending time, let me move first to the presentation. Dr. Richard Eba. Dr. Eba is a senior scientist in the Department of Forestry. He is based in Yawunde and he has been working on forestry issues for more than 30 years. He has been working on forestry for more than 30 years. We are very happy to meet you. We are very happy to meet you. Thank you, Mr. Moderator. I know that there is a question because I'm here for this coming in Spanish. Nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the organizers of CEPAO, I know you do well on this session in terms of learning from experience with the effectiveness of community based forestry. I would like to say a few things about the experience of the CEPAO. I cannot address to our session. My gratitude also goes to the members of the panel who confirmed the interview. I especially thank everyone who is online to follow this webinar. As you know, community based forestry has been practiced since ancestral times as a resource management approach. And it contributes to the resilience of the CEPAO. We are very sensitive including the production of forest goods and services, protection of culture. This is also a policy of the future. If we believe the recent last go declassion on forest and land use, which refers to empowering the communities and that others commit themselves to support communities. This webinar is a series of activities that CEPAO will carry out for at least one year on community based forestry. Once again, thank you. And I will let the floor to the moderator. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Richard Ibaachi for this introduction that gives us the opportunity to introduce the key address of Mr. Duncan who will present. I hope to hear the presentation of Mr. Duncan. Please share the screen with the presentation of Mr. Duncan. Mr. Duncan is a team leader and principal of CETA in forest and forestry. He works for the International Institute for Environment. Mr. Duncan is currently focusing on forest and farm facilities and he is trying to work to see how best to support local forest and farms. Prior to joining the forest and farm facilities, he managed forest connect that supported locally controlled forest and farm facilities as an alliance of more than 1,000 partitions. He has laid 94 countries around the world. So we are lucky to have Mr. Duncan today for the talks. He has been working for Al-Misu for a very long period. And you have the talk with Mr. Duncan. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Abdon. I'm afraid I can still hear the Spanish translator in my ear and it's very off-putting. So I'm not sure whether we can sort that out. Just a second, Mr. Duncan. Dini, if you hear us, please check your equipment. We hear the interpreter speaking, which makes the sounds very difficult. So please check and make sure that we can go forward. I'm sorry, Mr. Abdon. It's coming from Tomojin, the interpreter. She speaks in the floor, not in the system. Thank you. So how can we correct this? Ms. Tomojin, if you hear, please speak in the interpreter's system, not in the floor. Thank you. Okay. So I will also propose you send a message directly to the person because you can do so. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think we can resume. Mr. Duncan, you have the floor. Great. Thank you very much. Well, it's a great privilege to be here. My name's Duncan McQueen. And I'm the head of forestry at the International Institute of Environment and Development. It's a privilege to talk to you about community forestry. And you can see the many roles of community forestry in the pictures on this slide. Community is an important word. It means caring for others, serving the public good. And so community forestry is all about collaboration of people with one another and collaboration with nature. Balancing the trade-offs that they find between making incomes and protecting the environment. And in an era where planetarily damaging inequalities exist because nation states are competing for power and corporations are competing for profit. Community forestry offers a different alternative, a more cooperative future of people working with nature. So what is community forestry? Let's look at it broadly rather than putting it in a particular constraining box. No two communities are alike. And so community forestry embraces wide biocultural diversity. It includes indigenous peoples who are unique guardians of biodiverse forests. It includes other local communities often at the forest frontier and more market-oriented. It includes farm smallholders who plant trees and work together to pool their knowledge, negotiate better prices and share costs. And it includes processing clusters of sawmillers and furniture makers, non-timber processors and artisans. Finally, it includes those who plant and maintain trees in urban landscapes and architecture. And it's important to remember when talking about community forestry the value chains of community forest often end in urban areas in wooden construction and charcoal, food and other non-timber forest products. So we need to have an integrated plan for community forestry that links community forest with their markets. Well, why is community forestry so important globally? Firstly, community forestry has an enormous social scale. Of Earth's 7.8 billion people, almost 2.5 billion are indigenous peoples or local communities. And 1.3 billion of those are highly forest dependent. So that's a third of the world's population that's involved in some ways in these communities. Secondly, the climate impact of community forestry is huge. Indigenous peoples and local communities occupy more than 50% of the land and forests globally. And yet so far they only have legal rights to about 15% of the forests. They're vital for any climate solutions. Thirdly, in terms of economic power, we often think of small community forestry or farm small holders as insignificant. But collectively, they have strengthened numbers. The gross annual value of combined small holdings is been estimated by IUCN to be between US.8 and 1.3 trillion US dollars. And that makes community forestry and small holders globally the world's largest private sector by some margin. Finally, community forestry can efficiently deliver some of the things that the global public need. There are numerous studies that now confirm that indigenous peoples' territories are better at protecting forests than protected areas set up by the state. So community forestry is good for conservation. Secondly, we know that community forest areas, farmers working in forest areas are more efficient per unit area at producing food than say corporations in terms of the food that actually reaches the poor as well. And finally, community forest areas have to balance meeting different needs of society. And so they're critical in delivering the sustainable development goals, often the only source of income and revenue for meeting the sustainable goals, sustainable development goals locally. So how can we make community forestry effective? Well, in a series of dialogues that were held almost 10 years ago now, we worked with investors and community groups of different sorts to come up with an understanding of how to make community forestry effective. And it involves four key pillars. Firstly, we need to strengthen community forest organizations to ensure they're both locally accountable to the people in the area and also have financial management skills to be able to interact with outside entities. Secondly, we need to ensure that community groups have secure tenure because that is critical to make sure that people are encouraged into longer term investments in things like tree growing and forest management and protection. Thirdly, we need to advance technical know how so that people planting the right things in the right ways, keeping them free of pests and diseases that are a growing issue in terms of climate change. And fourthly, we need to invest in profitable businesses that make sustainability attractive so that the incentive for community forestry is also linked to local livelihoods. Now from the forest and farm facilities work over the last decade now, I've got just five tips about how to make community forestry more effective. The first is really to understand and explain the benefits to local people of working together. That means working together in local groups, first tier groups to share production costs, share information and improve your negotiating power with markets. But also, one can organize regionally to add value-added processing equipment and technology to provide marketing services for local groups, to provide services to local groups and finance. And thirdly, at the national level, the third tier national level, community forest organizations can be federated by the government to talk with government about making policies more enabling and perhaps acting as a channel for finance, development and climate finance to flow down to the lower levels. Internationally, community forest groups are sometimes joined in associations like the Allianza and Mesoamericana that can have an impact in global discussions like the Ashcock. So you can see that in Guatemala, there's many hundreds of local community groups, 11 regional groups, one national federation and a regional alliance. And in Guatemala, they have secured this pro Bosque law to guarantee 20 million US dollars per year for smallholder producers. And the AMPB at the fourth level has created a new climate finance mechanism to support community forestry. But it's not always possible for community forestry to act alone. In other countries, it can be a real advantage if you join community forest groups into national farmer federations who have better set-ups, communication infrastructure, marketing infrastructure and so on. So tip one, organize to thrive. Secondly, it's very important that community forestry gives returns to the community. So build business incubation into those organizational tiers. This is a diagram showing the new Ghana Forest Farm Federation. And you can see it has three zones, a forest zone, a transition zone and a savannah zone. And inside GAFAP, the organization, there's a national business incubation team. And that provides services to many businesses working in these different zones and serving over a million members that now belong to this federation. So if you're interested in knowing more about business incubation, the FFF has been producing both books describing it and tool kits for how to do that. Thirdly, use that growing business incubation capacity to broker policy roundtables to mobilize finance and support. In Vietnam, the Vietnam Farmers Union has been brokering these roundtables at commune level, district level, province level and national level. And it brings in private sector and government officials to talk with community groups to resolve problems that affect them in the market with policies and so on. So one of the success stories from Vietnam was the investor who you see in the bottom right-hand side. He was brought into a policy roundtable. He wanted to secure the supply of cinnamon and so he co-invested with the community group in a processing factory to produce 12 different types of cinnamon product. So mobilizing finance both within community forest groups and then co-investment with buyers can often be an easier route to finance than conventional banks. Fourthly, it's very important that community forest businesses are constantly staying active and not getting static. You have to evolve in business to survive. And that means that it's really helpful if you install a risk management process that happens on an annual basis so that community forest businesses, they take stock of their business objectives. They identify risks that might be to do with the market, policies, climate change, their staff capability. They identify which of those risks is high priority, which has a high probability of occurrence and a big scale of impact. And they choose those risks to address in the year ahead, assign somebody who's responsible and monitor progress. In Ecuador, we saw the COVID-19 crisis affecting the ability of local community groups to market their products. And so one of the cooperatives in Ecuador developed an internet-based online marketing and delivery website. As a proactive response to solve one of the risks they faced. So use risk assessment to keep you alive and evolving. And finally, especially in the face of climate change, try and diversify community forest practice and business to build resilience. COVID-19 has been a big threat over the last years. But as we look to the future, climate change risks are perhaps even more of a concern. And when we interviewed 41 different community forest-related groups in six countries, their top priority was to know how to cope with an ever-more variable climate that's affecting planting, plant survival, what they can sell and so on. So it's very important to build resilience. And that's not just about ecological resilience. It's also about offering new services and support mechanisms to your members. Selling and marketing new things in different ways. Building up your physical infrastructure so that you can cope better with climate-related shocks in the future. And you can see this community forest group in Madagascar who used to be producing peanut oil, now diversifying into aromatic oils so as to have less risk of complete failure. So those are just five tips for making community forestry more effective. You can read more details in the publications that I've tried to show on the screen. And now I'll hand back to our moderator. And thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much, Mr. Duncan McQueen for this elaborated presentation. Very comprehensive. Thanks again. We can understand that talking about community forestry, we really have to think broad. We need to think about market issues. We need to think about policy. We need to think about the living condition of local communities. We need to think about the sustainability of the landscape that are targeted. So there are a certain number of issues we need to bear in mind. We need to strengthen the capacity of local communities if we want to succeed community forestry. We have to secure ten years for local communities. And there is a great need of developing a kind of technical knowledge to push forward and address the challenges coming from community forestry initiatives. And of course, there is also a need to invest to make community forestry attractive and to ensure returns to the local communities. Because if it is not the case, it is obvious that we are taking into consideration the realities of the area. Thank you so much again, Mr. Donkin Matrin. We will now see the opportunity to introduce to you a video that will present a case that is specific to Nepal. And from it, I think we will also learn a lot from that. So please, can you introduce the video presenting the case of Nepal? I am a member of the National Forest Governance and before 1992, all rights to forest were held by the state. And so a decision was taken after a lot of debate to actually devolve rights to forest to communities. And so the law gave communities rights since 1992 about 20,000 community forest user groups have been established legally in Nepal. Women are principal beneficiaries of the forest. And women are quite often the community members who collect the non-timber forest products. So it's women who harvest the lemon grass. We were born in Nepal. We were born in Nepal. We were born here. And we got married. We lived here for a long time. We were born here. We didn't get our rights. We got the rights of women. We have the rights of our soldiers. We didn't have the rights to live here. We didn't have the rights to Well, this is a tremendous example of a community for the people. Well, this is a tremendous example of a community forest enterprise. And the most significant one is elephant rides that are offered to tourists. So this is proving an important source of income for the community forest user group. All these examples that are in the form of different types of animals are used to help the community forest user group. All these examples that are in the form of different enterprises that have now come up in the context of Nepal, especially in the last 10 years or so, everything has only been possible because the communities now have been granted the right to access the resources. And that has only been possible because of the rights to evolution in the context of Nepal. What this has also facilitated is that the communities can now partner with private enterprises, for instance. They may not always have the capital or the equipment to process and produce what they want to produce. So in a way, this access to the market of community forest user groups has been facilitated by the rights that have been devolved in the form of general rights. I think we're finding that leadership in the community is very, very important. It's also a factor of regulation. We find that there's quite considerable differences across Nepal and how the district forestry office interacts with the community forest user groups, particularly on economic enterprises. The law is extremely strong. We also find that there's a lot of work to be done in the field of farming. We don't even know the name of the office. And all of us have seen it. We have seen it in the film. We have seen it in the film as well. Thank you so much for this nice video that can help us to have an idea on a specific case of community-based forestry. What is really interesting here is that we can see how women can take advantage of the community forestry to improve the livelihoods, how they can organize themselves to value natural resources globally speaking. And we can link this video to the last presentation from Mr. Duncan McQueen, which means that community-based forestry is also something that can go forward bearing in mind the needs of local communities. And that's how we can make sure that we progress with specific objectives and making sure that the practices are for sustainable manner. That can be taken into consideration in a long term, not just to improve the livelihoods of people, but thinking about the future of innovation. So, ladies and gentlemen and dear participants, we will move to the next item, the round table on the team learning from experience to increase the effectiveness of community-based forestry. We are lucky to have around the table very key people who have been working on that issue for decades and will share their experience on how we can go forward, how did they succeeded to solve the type of challenges they have been meeting along the line. So, we are lucky to have with us Mr. Anna Centeno, Dr. Honorita Boona coming from ICAS, Dr. Juju Seogorun working for the African Development Bank, and of course Mr. Karma, who is also close to the FAO project and will share his experience. Let's start by Ms. Centeno. Ms. Centeno is a community leader from Peten, Guatemala, and served as the secretary on the board of directors of the Camerita cooperative. Ms. Centeno is very interested in valuing non-timber forest products specifically, and she works to improve the value chain of several of them, including Zedley ferns, al species, Ramon knot, and so on and so forth. So, Mr. Teno, can you please tell us how you will be dealing with all this and which link can we establish with the community-based forestry? The floor is yours, Ms. Centeno. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to share my experience with the Peten Forestry Association in Guatemala. We are the Peten Forestry Association, which is an organization of community-based forestry management that is sustainable. Each organization has its respective management plans, which are authorized by each organization. It is the director of the Protected Areas. It is the Feramaya Forestry Association, specifically the SUM. We are a model of rural development for Guatemala with the International Foundation and international organizations. We have achieved to be an entity that represents political incidents and all organizations. As I said, we are a second-level organization. The work we do in our organizations is basically agroforestry. We work on the chain of value of shat, Ramon, wood, pepper, honey, tourism, community tourism. Let me tell you that since about 25 years ago, we have formed organizations to manage. We adopted these actions and we have been acting with the government of Guatemala to support the local community. This has not been very easy because we had to manage resources in a virtual manner. All of this enables us to manage resources together. We also are taking into account all the elements to manage together. These are the elements which we have been able to accomplish for the past 25 years. We are therefore providing support to ensure that community organizations are able to have a political impact. We are also trying to empower communities of people working in civil society organizations so that people are able to manage their resources. Why do we say that we have interest in managing communities for as better? All of this has to do with the fact that we have 3,000 to 5,000 hectares of land with trees that we manage. At this point in time, the community counts on its own technicians. We have a large human capital and this helps us to manage communities in one way or another. All of this has taken into account all these objectives and we are looking for ways in which we can create an office for business relations. We are looking forward to creating markets for the commercialization of our products. We have a negotiation model at community level which helps us to ensure the exploitation of the products that we produce. Every four years we have to be doing incidents and presenting the model to be able to have a good relationship with the government. So that governments can be able to receive support and work with government organizations. With regard to our relationship with government, we have received 5 additional constitutional authorizations. As I was saying, a co-force major activity is to improve the living conditions of our people and to create new production value chains for the benefit of all. I'm going to focus a little more on some aspects of our actions. We organize our communities taking into account the interest of men and women value chains create more economic benefits for everybody. And there are a number of activities that men can carry out with in their communities alongside their household chores. In a co-force we have several activities that we carry out and we have tourist activities where women have been empowered to assist tourists at local level. An important element is the fact that we also engage in investment. Each year we invest about 400,000 to 500,000 US dollars in the prevention of bushfires. And this means that these policies make sure that fires do not break out in communities so we are working to protect all of our forests and all the plots of land that we have received in terms of concessions. We have over 500,000 hectares of land that we are responsible for maintaining an upkeep. And we have relationships which are quite sound with government officials and we do everything to make sure that bushfires do not attack our forest reserves. To be able to obtain resources and support different activities in communities. It's an institution that helps us support communities and we work tirelessly to ensure that we meet our objectives. In this regard, I could say we have made significant progress in the activities that we carry out. And with regard to the traditional work that we do today, we can carry out our actions in an organized manner without hitch. We have a section 885 of our national law which speaks about authorization for concessional agreements and we respect all those procedures. Okay, we have been requesting more concessional agreements for the possession of land. I will come back to you later. Thank you for this first intervention. If you can conclude, please for this first intervention. Okay, I think Mr. Tenor is done. Thank you so much. I'm really sorry for the French translation, because I got the message that the translation didn't work. So the technician will set the equipments in such a way that next intervention, the translation be very interesting. Thank you so much. I will come back to Mr. Tenor later on. I would like now to move towards Dr. Noore Tabuna. Dr. Noore Tabuna has worked for several international organizations, including the World Agroforestry Center in Central Africa. This now, let's say, in charge of is the Commissioner for the Environment Natural Resources Agricultural Rural Development Department from the Economic Community of Central African State. So Mr. Noore Tabuna, knowing that you've been working on those issues for more than 30 years, what can we learn from your experience? What's the link with the policy that is being implemented at the level of the Economic Community on Central African State? You have the floor for five minutes, please. Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator. I would like to thank the organizers for inviting the ECA to this meeting. And we are based in Libreville in Gabon. The Commissioner in charge of Environmental Management, Management of Natural Resources Agricultural Rural Development. It is a pleasure that I come here in the name of one of the members of the CEC and in the name of Ambassador Gilberto Diplada, who is the President of the Commission, to share with you quickly, as he said, I've been working on these issues for several years with the idea of seeking value, or the idea of adding more economic value to these issues of natural capital, in which the forest in general is one of the representatives, and the community forest in particular has been called. I have only five minutes, so in five minutes, I can't say everything. Normally, I would have to take more time because I represent 11 states, but hey, we're going to reduce that in five minutes. Just to tell you that the fact of working for the CEC and looking at and listening to each other, we are in an economic sector that is still in the embryonic state. We are going to move to another element which requires an innovation to make sure that all of us make progress, and this goes with markets. And we cannot stop simply at a level of local markets, which is that thinking of how to move to national or regional markets, most especially for them. I would say for the people and we are in a period where we are working towards the African continent of free trade area, and we need to make efforts to roll back all tariff and non-tariff barriers, so that the people who manage community forests should be able to sell the produce of their forests well beyond their geographical forests. We have a market of over 200 million people on the basis of scientific information from the sub-regional office of the Economic Commission for Central African States, and the office based in Yawunde, it is mentioned that the market will reach about 400 million consumers in the nearest future, and we need to have a share center site for community forests. This means that for the ECA, it is a regional approach that will help to solve the issue of developing community forests and its economy. So we are going to take all these elements on board, and in the sub-regional forestry scheme, we would see what we can do about it. In Central Africa, we know we do not have a forestry policy, but this issue of community forests has been taken into account in the strategic plan that we adopted and asked heads of states of ECA to adopt. So we therefore have a political willpower at sub-regional level to develop the economy of community forests. At this point where we have it today, the issue is to know what would the economic sector of our Central African forest economy be in the next 10 or 15 years or in 20 years. One of the things we need to do is to make sure that, or I think this has already been incorporated in the policy, is to look at the institutional framework, given that we need to work at regional level. We need the federation or the confederation of our states. We need to put our community forests together in Central Africa, and this federation or this grouping should be strong enough, very strong I would say, and help it carry its actions without hitch. The next thing has to do with capacity building, capacity building for all groupings. These groupings need to work hard. How can we carry out this organization? Generally, we thought that all functions of an enterprise could be taken into account that is production, processing, trade, marketing, accountancy, etc. We need to get specialization in specific areas of competence, and we see what exactly is the relationship they have with other stakeholders from civil society. We can take on board consultants to help them play the role and do the job that enterprises need, and issues of marketing, etc. I only have five minutes, I would say. Community forests are quite important for all of us because in Central Africa today, we have the confederation of small and medium sized craftsmen. This is the only sector today which is doing tedious work. If we take the issue, the timber sector, you see that there are a lot of craftsmen who are being in the timber sector to develop the sector, so a lot of investment is expected for things to take off. I am here in Brazzaville within the framework of a conference organized by the United Nations on the economic value of natural capital within Central Africa. I noticed that there are so many organizations with specific outlined agendas, and you would see that people have different objectives that they are pursuing in a meeting like this. I see that people we have here are all experts, and what we should do together with ECA, CEMAC, the states, and all those involved in the area of research and economy should put themselves together and adopt a true development model for community forestry. What is a model that can be adopted? Once this model would have been adopted, we would see how we can add value to what the people are doing independently. There is nothing we can invent. The entire world economy on natural capital etc. proceeds from these things, and as far as biodiversity is concerned, you would say that a lot of people had done so many things in the past. I would take the case of coffee, coffee which of course was a spontaneous crop. You see how some countries have developed on the basis of the sale of coffee. So they probably cannot, some countries probably cannot do everything, but we need to open up doors to all these people who work on community forest, people who come from forest areas, etc. So we need to open the doors to all these people who are coming from research institutions, etc. So in five minutes, this is what I could tell you how to say that we have a vision at a level of a subregion for the management of our forests in the environmental forestry management schemes. We are finding ways through which we can incorporate a community forest. It is a regional program for forests which head of states adopted, and we are going to make of this program a permanent program, permanent. And we would work with all those who have a say in community forest management to have a shared vision of the objectives that we pursue. So that 30, 40 years after, we shouldn't be at the same level. This is business. It is not just about engaging in philosophy, it's about engaging in business. This is what the people expect of us. There are no two ways to do business. You need to develop the market, produce goods, and you develop every order necessary. Mr. moderator, this is what I had to say so far. We have a real willpower or the political willpower from heads of states to develop the urban forestry sector. And this is also a part of green economy sector in Central Africa. We know Central African countries are opening up their doors to green economy. This is an element that you must take into account to help the people engage in environmental protection. We know that Central Africa has just been plebiscited out of the eight wrecks in the African Union. Central Africa wreck has caught the best in terms of environmental protection and biodiversity protection and you know that thanks to the issue of you know that Central Africa today is protecting more its forest by limiting deforestation. You see what is happening in the Congo Basin for area, we are protecting our forest even more. We have to delve out of reflection into real transformation of our capital towards having contributions that will lead to the diversity of the economies of our countries and promote a real private sector that is active in the area of forestry. I would like to end here at this level. Thank you very much. We are going to come back to you for take home messages. Intervention. What we can bear in mind is that business is very key. The issue is not only to make sure that we manage our forest ecosystem sustainably, but we should take advantage of the products coming from those ecosystems to improve the living standards of people. And it is key to work and to invest on business. The other issue is that you're thinking about a kind of model that can be used all over Central African countries to make sure that we move towards a common, I mean, we move towards common solutions and that we make sure that we build a kind of policy that can help us to go forward. And of course you mentioned that there is a need of reinforcing the institutional framework in Central Africa, and you underlined that there is a great will to go forward with a different state. So we'll come back to you. Let's move to Dr. Julius to proceed to go on with Chief Forestry Officer at the African Natural Resources Center, African Development Bank, based in Abidjan, and prayer to joining the bank, Dr. Chedewoon work with C4, FAO, and Barvesty International. So Mr. Julius, I know you've been working on those issues linked to the financing mechanism, the government issues, livelihoods, and so on and so forth. Can you tell us a little bit, what can we return from the experience of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, you know, in Central Africa? I think working for the African Development Bank, it is very key that we talked about that aspect of the problem, the financing mechanism. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for this initiative. I think it's a very good one. Not to repeat what you said about myself. I'm now at the African Natural Resources Center of the African Women Bank for the last three years. Then with respect to our discussion today, I think it's very important. I think Duncan and Dr. Onore, all of them have already pointed out what we need to make a community-based forest management a success. When we look at the tenure, the need for proper organization, the need for us to ensure that we have a good business capacity and then the technical know-how. And then with respect to finance, which is one of the biggest hurdle, is with respect to the business environment. So I will be taking an example from the Congo Basin Forest Fund, which was a trust fund set up by some international partners. It's actually a multi donor trust fund. Actually, we would main driver being the United Kingdom, Norway and Canada. These were the main people that put in some flesh for money and put into this initiative. And the trust fund was hosted by the African Women Bank for a period of almost 10 years. 10 years, I can say, because the first phase of this program was 10 years. So it ended in 2019. It was actually the UK pledged almost 60 million euros. We always joined them just a year later to put in 60 million. And then in Canada, the Canadians gave me later in 2013 to put in 40 million euros. The objective of this fund was to alleviate poverty and mitigate climate change by reducing deforestation in the Congo Basin through social forest management. The then president of the bank said that during the launching of the fund said, if we succeed, we must, the people of the Congo Basin will have made a major contribution to humanity. It was the then president of the bank group, Donald Trump. So the justification of this fund was that the people that put in money, they thought that there was no need for this deforestation in Central Africa. There was need for us to see that wild food security and better livelihoods. They consider the forest of the Congo Basin or Central Africa as a global public good. There was need for local communities in terms of ownership, increased ownership, because in the Central Africa region, we have more of a public ownership of forest. Actually, the entire program had five teams. One was social forest management, one was on livelihoods and economic development. The second was on measurement and reporting and verification of deforestation in the region. The third default was on benefits for carbon markets and ecosystem services. And then if it was beating capacity on right plus in the region. Then, in terms of projects, projects, a number of projects were submitted by internal projects selection approval process. There was a call for proposal by the governing council. And then there was short listing by the secretariat of the fund. And then in those endorsement of the shortlisted projects by the governing council. And there was a project appraiser and processing and then finally a final approval by the bank. In terms of the project portfolios, in total during the lifespan of this, there were actually two calls for a project proposal. The first one led to selection of 15 projects, the second to five projects. And there was one project that was actually endorsed by the governing council, the governing council of the project. So in total, we had for one project in those, in those operations. And then the bank approved the date of this. The four of the projects went to the end succeeded but at some way between the line for them were cancelled. In terms of community management, as I'm going to see tell you now, 13 of these projects were run by government. And regional government institutions are coming back and review. But out of these 27 were actually run by civil society organizations operating the Congress. So we see this included community based organizations and all forms of NGOs and all form of civil society organizations. Actually, the CFS involved 10 countries. Our Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic, Guarani, Gabon, Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Chad, and Satomeya. In terms of the actual cash, as of the first in 2018 that the project ended, we had, coming out of the funds that were, we had the 73 almost 74 million dollars that was committed, euros that was committed. And out of that, 64 million was disbursed, giving a disbursement rate of about 86%. So that is about the project. Why were the results? So we have some, I don't know what I would say about the results in the next discussion or I just say, okay, it's what I see here. So before the result main results were classified before different headings, social knowledge management, livelihoods, economic development, monitoring, reporting, verification, and then benefits from carbon markets and ecosystem services. So as you've heard very well from Duncan's discussion, that tenure is very important. One aspect for success of community-based forest management. So land use plans were developed for 34, almost 35 million hectares of forest. And then more than 100,000 men and women were trained on sustainable management of forest resources. Nine Congo basin countries, nine counties in Congo in the Central Africa region have red, red, red net plants. Over 40,000 men and women have improved access to land and property. This is what we're talking about tenure security. And then the project also saw 100, about 100,000 additional hectares of forest land under community management. Then the project put in place for beneficiary mechanisms, mechanisms. So those were the main results. So maybe for the lessons learned, because something came out very, very interesting. The project had a lot of success stories, but there were a few downturns that a lot of lessons were learned from the project. And I think we may have to discuss this next, or I should just go and finish. Jelous, I think you will wait for a while, because I know Nori was coming from another meeting. I would like to let him finish his time. Our hand here is all about the Congo Basin Forest Forest Form. Generally briefly, like the brief, how we went, the project, the Congo Basin Forest Form was set up and implemented on the main results. So I will end here for now and then we'll continue with the lessons later. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much, Jelous, for your comprehensive intervention. We will come back to you to see what's the lessons we can draw to make sure that we contribute to improve the community based forestry initiatives around the world. Thank you so much. Because I know Dr. Onore Tabuna will be leaving very soon. I would like to come back to you, Onore. Qu'est-ce que nous pouvons considérer comme des leçons qui peuvent contribuer au niveau politique en Afrique centrale à améliorer le processus de la foresterie participative? En trois, quatre minutes. S'il te plaît, j'ai pas bien suivi la question. Onore, thank you very much. Thank you. I would like to ask you, I'm saying that I know we are in a process where we think we can do a lot better on the basis of experiences that we have collected so far throughout the world. I would like to know who have presented the situation of Central Africa to us. I would like to know what proposals you can make to ensure that we get things better and improve the process of participatory forestry or community forestry in Central Africa and across the world. This is a very good question because you are saying across the world, this is a global issue. We need, first of all, to make sure that those of us who provide support to these communities need to put our hands together and have a world-class initiative on this issue. It would be a positive thing to see that C4 and other organizations working on the issue of forest management be together in a kind of consortium. We would define a vision and common objectives that will help us make progress. We have what it takes intellectually. We have our resource which is diversified. We even have the cultural expertise. Indigenous people have know-how which gives us information that can yield economic spin-offs or we can use some of those things for the production of cosmetic products, etc. The issue is to know which organization can join hands with which organization to see that we make progress. ECA has a vision, etc. In my opinion, what we need to look at closely is the fact that we need to merge our efforts. You see that C4, ECAS, ECRAF, etc. can put their hands together and see how we can develop forestry or forest management. At a level of ECAS, we can build a framework document and make sure that we work together with the network on community forest. I believe that with you who are in the area of research, some of us politicians, we can put networks of marketing and forest management systems to do something together. In Central Africa, we have just merged all higher institutes of learning which shall be invited to attend a meeting in Brazzaville next week. And we are trying to see how we can merge our efforts. We have a model of a private sector which is indigenous, which exists so far. And if we put our efforts together, if we are well organized, we can quickly improve the livelihoods of our people. People have markets and let us put our hands together and do business. States in Central Africa or analysts or politicians are all in agreement. We need to start making things happen. Those who want to help the people form a consortium and they will make progress together. The next element is that we need a network of all these community forests and we would have a major world program set up on the economy of community forestry. It's a different story. When we talk about community forest, it is something that can generate a lot of revenue where everybody makes a contribution to us improving the livelihoods of our people and generating wealth for the state. So this is what our states could do. This is what I can tell you at this juncture. So I say we can do a lot of things. We are present and we are the people who have the possibility of marshaling resources, speaking to politicians, etc. The fact that I am present here with all the activities that I have on my hands I decided to sneak out and attend this meeting because it is useful for us to develop the issue of community forest. I am not talking about developing community forestry but developing the economy that can be generated from forestry management. How can we add value to the activities that community forest can generate. Thank you very much. But you have accepted to join us for this important event. Thanks a lot. The key lesson from your message is that we really have to create a kind of network of community based forestry initiatives in Central Africa. You started doing some initiatives. You started taking some initiatives on that line with the forest preschools and so on and so forth. I think your message has been understood. Thanks a lot for your intervention. I will introduce someone, Mr. Karma, who is Chief Forestry Officer, a Social Forestry Infection Division from the Department of Forest and Park Services. Can I leave now? Yes, thank you very much. Can I leave? Thank you very much. We are ready to put in place the network. We are ready. Hi, so I was about to introduce Mr. Karma. Mr. Karma is Chief Forestry Officer at Social Forestry and Extension Division from the Department of Forest and Park Services of Bhutan. Mr. Karma experience covers agroforestry plantations and non-wood forest products management of course, with the aim to improving the governance and livelihoods of local communities. I had the opportunity to hear from Mr. Karma who will tell us about the experience from his country and how this experience can contribute to improve the community based forestry initiatives around the world. So Mr. Karma, you have the floor for about five minutes. Hello everyone. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Thank you. So I don't have to introduce myself and I'm very happy to be in this forum, learning from experience to increase effectiveness of community based forest forest. Very interesting. If I may share my experience. I think when we talk about the community based forest management, we've heard a lot about it. The benefits of community based forest, economical benefits, social benefits, environmental benefits, and if you like, cultural benefits. And how do we make it more effective? How do we make this community based forest management more effective? I say more effective because I wanted to emphasize more on effectiveness of community based forest. It becomes more effective because it gives a room to look at the responsibilities, empowerment, and also the ownership. And more so, it becomes more effective because community based forest management allows to recognize the very important aspects of the social part. If you look at the social landscape, because it gives us community based forest management gives us to look at the social landscape. Through that lens, we would be able to recognize who are the vulnerable group within the village or community. It becomes more gender sensitive. And it is also, if you like, a biodiversity sensitive. And it is also becoming more psychological and health sensitive. Because community based forest management, community based forest, not only contributes to economic, social, environmental, and cultural, but it becomes more effective by allowing to recognize who are more vulnerable to climate change. And look at the pandemic time. The community based forest management allows the communities to form a group and to be in one group and become more functional in terms of decision making, in terms of preparedness to cope up with the disasters. And also it becomes more networks within themselves to help each other, which gives the community based forest more effective in terms of even during the pandemic time. It would become more effective. We don't know how the future will look like, because just now we are experiencing this pandemic, but in future we may have more dangerous or more, you know, disaster, which the community based forest will be prepared to face this, you know, whatever the disaster that comes related to pandemic, or even if you think more related to climate change. As we know that the climate change is happening. It's coming and there will be more, if you do not really act, you know, there will be more climate change related disasters. So the community based forest will become more effective during that time, because it allows, as I said, it allows to, you know, to identify the most vulnerable group within the group, and will also facilitate to provide opportunity for them to be prepared for any disasters. So what we need to do is we need to really lift and lift the community based forest at the local level, and even at the global level. But if can, we can also think to make this community based forest more reckon more recognizable in the call. Because what's more important is the local people. Why we are managing, why we are having the policies, why we are having the legal framework, we are having all these policies and legal framework in order to make communities more, more productive in terms of economic and more socially cohesive in terms of social capital and more environmentally sound in terms of contributing the community based forest in sustainable management forest management and more culturally, culturally preserved and and and you know to reckon their identity, a community based forest makes an institution which will be more effective than the disaster and which can be more responsive, because it has, it will build the social capital within the community, within communities, when we build the social capitals, because once we have the community, they have the norms, they have the networks, they have the trust, and they have the governance and collective actions, and that will make them more responsive and more effective to know to for sustainability as well as to be prepared during the any kind of disasters happen to them and community. I think we should, we should believe that community based forest management is one of the, one of the best, best ways to to to manage the forest sustainability and also to make the communities more vibrant in terms of economic, social and environmental and even the cultural and these are the very important things I think one aspect we can look at is the payment for environmental services. Now, if you look at some of the communities, like if there's a water crisis in a community. Now, people look at the community forest management groups to manage the water crisis if the water source is from the community forest. And if there's a water crisis, they look at the community forest management group as solutions because they can manage the forest, and they can also make the water more, you know, available and constant flow of water and make available to the community. That is more important. Other thing is, I wanted to focus is you can look from the different dimension that community forest can be a health sensitive, you know, now somebody in the previous, somebody from the previous speaker said that you can see the community forest is probably at a health point of view, this is how the community forest can be more affordable in terms of health because cities can come to the community forest and the look at the forest if the forest more ecological sound and also sustainability managed and very good environment, then people can use that forest for the health reasons. When you go in the forest, people will definitely feel that it gives them psychological confidence and psychological health to the people who wanted to visit the forest for the benefit of the community, for the benefit of the health. So I feel that community-based forest management is one of the best ways that if you want to manage the forest sustainably, that's the way for that to do it. And even looking from the protected point of view, forest protection point of view, if you like a protected areas, if you do not involve communities in the conservation, in the to manage the protected areas, it would be very difficult. So I think I'm getting some chance to talk about the challenges and also talk about the improvement that we need to focus in the future for community-based forest management. So I'll just stop here, I'll just stop here, yes? I know you've been waiting for a while. Let's just conclude your intervention. You have one minute, then I will not come back to you. What's your take-home message? My take-home message is you should believe on community and you should trust the community and you should build the community from the point of having stable tenure system. So they should have legal backup and they should be involved in any kind of sustainable forest management. So without involving of the communities, I think it is very difficult for us to manage the forest, as well as it's very difficult for you to make the forest for climate change, if you like, improve the forest for climate change, that's it, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr. Karma, your intervention is so interesting. The take-home message, as you said, we need to take into consideration two dimensions, the local and the global level, and we need to make sure that we bring the solutions linked to the social, economic, and environmental concerns. So thank you so much for your intervention. I will go back to Ms. Centeno, I hope she's online. And this time I will give you the floor for one minute, only one minute, because we are running out of time. One minute for your take-home message, Ms. Centeno, you have the floor. Ms. Centeno, are you online? Is Ms. Centeno online? Okay, okay, so you take-home message, please. Just to conclude your interventions. These activities, with a better quality, I think that, together with efforts, we can also counter-impact negative impacts on climate change. The activities we carry out, sustainable management, I think, these are early alerts for mitigation of climate change. Wouldn't you like to have my intervention? Okay, Madam Centeno, I think you're done. Are you? Yes. Okay. Thank you so much to Ms. Centeno for this great intervention. I will have to, I will move to, so let me move to the next speaker, which is Honoree Haslepsi has finished, so it's okay, let me move to Julius Tegohum. Julius, we all agree the financing mechanism is very important and very key for the success of committee-based forestry. So, what's the Tegohum message? What do you think should be done to make sure that we improve the way things are being conducted on the ground? Well, we need to recognize in the forestry sector that any intervention, actually I have six telephone messages in terms of lessons on implementing forest projects, in terms of scaling up a trust fund, setting up a trust fund and managing it, in terms of download relations and in terms of communication and evaluation of such trust funds. But I will summarize this by saying that we need inclusive participatory processes and to know that this process takes time. So, any professional project, we put three years, we may not get the required results. We cannot demonstrate results in forestry sector within three years. We need to allow ourselves some time because most projects are linked to the forestry-required changes in behavior and a lot of other things. Setting up the networks and all that requires time, so we shouldn't have project less than five years. The second thing I want to say is that for an innovative trust fund that has to deal with forestry, we need to recognize that the possibility of failure and knowing that for success, success may come from failure, if failures are understood and learned from. So, in a project like these, we had 86% percent, we had a lot of surface up to 80% of indicators but we also have a few failures. But we should know that these failures should not make us feel that we are losing, that we should always know that we can learn from those failures to move forward. And that ties up to what Duncan talked about, use risk to identify development pathways. The risk here is that possibility of failure, so we can use that to define our development pathway, pathways in all projects that can be governed by trust funds, financed by trust funds. I think basically for one minute it's okay for me, thanks. Thank you so much for your intervention. I'm very happy you could come around. What we can take home, I mean based on what we've just said, it is very important to take into consideration a long time planning because a project of three years will not be enough to transform the situation on the ground. So it is important to take into consideration the fact that we need planning in a long run. For instance, projects for at least five years, even 10 to make sure that we go forward with a key, I mean key initiatives we need to transform. So thank you so much for your intervention, Julius. And we are looking forward to continue discussing on the issues we've talked about today. And let me see what we can now to move to the next step. During this webinar, we've decided to launch the call for success stories on community-based forestry. And I would like to introduce first of all, Jean-Claude Nguyen-Gyri working for FAO. Jean-Claude Nguyen-Gyri is someone we've been working with International Organization for so long. We have spent a lot of time with the FAO. And I'm quite sure that he will tell us why did we come up with that initiative? I want to be doing before I give the floor to divine for them. Jean-Claude, are you online? Jean-Claude, can you follow me Jean-Claude? Okay. If Jean-Claude is not online, I will go straight to divine for them. Divine for them is a scientist in seafaring craft based in Central Africa in Yaudet specifically. He works on the value chains and enterprises. And he has the opportunity to tell us what's the content of the call for successful, I mean for successful in seafaring storage. So if you can put on the screen the call, I will be very happy. Divine, you have the floor, please. Thank you very much, Abdom. I don't know if these people are hearing me. I can't follow from the mic. Thank you very much, Abdom, for giving me the opportunity to present the call for successful tourists on community-based forestry. I think we have heard interesting stories about successes of community forestry across Africa and Asia and even Latin America from the world tops of Duncan, Anna and Kema. Julos also talked about the finance mechanism. But if you look at, if you listen to the digital, you will often hear that more negative stories about community forestry, community-based forestry than the success stories. So what we want to capture here is, do we really have success stories? And if yes, what are they? So our objective of the call is to identify some community-based forestry success stories for the preparation of a sentences report, which will be used to provide evidence about community forest success stories. So what can we actually learn from these stories and how can we use it or that? What can we gain from these success stories to come up with new interventions to use community forest in improving livelihoods and the forest landscape in general? So the proposed call for success stories should actually tell us stories about what actually, what factors contributed to the success stories we are trying to describe in the call for abstracts that we are talking about. So we should bring out the factors, which may be innovations in the legal context. There may be well-organized producer groups as Duncan mentioned of. There may be business or financial approaches, as Honoré talked about. It may be also the fact that it was very inclusive because it included a lot of youths and women in the entire process. So we are calling for success stories. The first stage is the call for abstracts. We would expect abstracts of between 800 to 1,000 words, which first, what is the content of the abstract? It should be a catchy title and an introduction that describe the context and major challenge that the success stories try to describe. Then the body should talk more about what change actually they commit in the success stories or in the context in which we are describing. What was learned in the entire process? We expect the abstract to come up with success stories to come up with powerful statistics to show numbers of what changed over the period that we are describing. If we also have interesting quotes, please add them in the success stories. So we expect, for those who are interested, and I believe most of you in this call are interested in the success stories, we expect that by the, as from today, between today, December 7th and January 7th, that is one month from now, we expect that you come up with, you send your abstract to us and the abstract should be sent to, we will share with you the flyer that describes, that launches the call for success story. You will send to floraesmuno at cgiiro.org and also to abdonawono at cgiiro.org. A.awono at cgiiro.org. Can you type that in the chat? Yeah, I really like it. So we expect the abstract to come in latest January 7th, 2022. As I said, the abstract should be between 800 to 1000 words and it could be in either English, Spanish or French. Then we expect the full stories to be developed between January 29th, between January and March 11th, we expect the full success stories to be submitted for those whose abstract will be selected. So between December 7th, which is today and July 30th, we are expecting to have a full list of the book that described the success stories published by the 31st of July. So we expect that the 20 cases that will be selected based on the abstract will be supported by C4, a collaborative collaboration with F.O.O. to develop the full success stories that will be between 3000 and 4000 words. Without much ado, Abdon, I think that is the content of our success story. So we are expecting all of you to send these exciting stories that we've shared with us for those who do not have the opportunity to present today or those who presented please share your success stories to us and the panel of scientists who are these and will select 20 of those cases that we are going to showcase in the book that we have been intending to publish by July, 2022. Thank you very much, Abdon. Thank you so much, Devine. We can then see that we had the opportunity to share the experience from some people during this conference. But of course we have many other cases that people would like to put forward for people to know around the world. That's why we would like to get the final publication with 20 success stories that will be very key for the future of community forestry because we need to share what works and we need to show what we should be doing to make sure that we improve the process along the line. So thank you so much for your great presentation. We are moving towards the closing remarks. I hope Dr. Jean-Claude Gingiri is already around for him to take the floor. It was a great pleasure to have all of you online who will share as much as possible all the documents that we generated during this conference and you will receive a message distributing all those. It is also a great thanks to the speakers. It has been very, very tremendous, very, very helpful. And Whitney, I know we all learned something from this important event. Jean-Claude, are you online for the closing remarks? Jean-Claude, is Jean-Claude around? Yes, Jean-Claude is online. Thank you so much, Jean-Claude. You have the floor. Make sure you control your mic because we cannot hear you. Jean-Claude, I saw the answer from Jean-Claude saying that he is online. Maybe he has some challenges with the network. Jean-Claude, if you have, if you follow us. It's okay. Okay, thanks a lot, Jean-Claude. We can follow you. Yes, okay. Okay. Sorry, yes. Okay. Yes, okay. Dear participants, dear colleagues, we have reached the end of this important event. On behalf of FAO and CIFAR-ECRF, I want to thank all our participants for their time and active participation during this webinar. My appreciation goes to speakers and panelists for their fruitful contribution. Also, to Abdon for being a good moderator for this webinar. This event outlining the need to learn from the past experiences to make CBF more effective and reinforce the role of Compti-Benz Forestry has an appropriate means to assist countries in their effort to address emerging issues such as halting deforestation, restoring forest ecosystems, building resilience in forest-dependent communities and improving their livelihood. I believe that we have reached a consensus on this matter. The challenge is now to get the commitment of participants to disseminate the call for success stories on CBF and to submit abstracts. Dear participants, the success of this initiative is in your hands. We need your support and cooperation. Please disseminate the call for success stories with your networks. Invite your colleagues. Invite your friends to submit an abstract. The launch of the first call for success stories on Compti-Benz Forestry has took place today. After this first call, there is a need to continue to collect other success stories. As you know, there are hundreds of successful initiatives that can serve as models for future projects. I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to invite other partners to join FAO and CIFARI craft in making this initiative more useful, giving the opportunity to countries to learn each other from their success and values and putting forest-dependent communities on the frontline of sustainable use of forestry and also action against deforestation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jean-Claude. I think we all learned from what we had during this seminar. We now have to go forward. And what we should bear in mind is that we need to distribute the call for those who have not been able to join us here. I think we still have a chance to let them know there is a process that will lead to a great presentation by the end of this year. And we need to select the key stories, the very suitable stories about community-based forestry. And I know the number of people we had during this conference were around 200 people moving up and down because some people have been coming in and going up. Thanks a lot for your great presentation. It is very, very appreciated. We are very happy for that. Thank you to FAO. Thank you to CIFARI craft. We are all, we are together, like we say in my country. Thank you so much. And we wish you a very nice day. Thanks a lot. And bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.