 Women and men from around Lake Buru National Park came to talk to us as part of a governance assessment. They shared their stories of conservation and how it impacts their lives. Hi, I'm Medod Twinamasko. I work for Barare University of Science and Technology, found here in southwestern Uganda. In the next 10 days, I will be the lead facilitator of the governance assessment of Lake Buru National Park that is behind me. The governance assessment starts with a scoping workshop and we invite about 15 key representatives of stakeholder groups to come along. Together, we do group exercises on the history of the protected area. We select the key areas and principles that the governance assessment should interrogate. We make sure the assessment process involves all key stakeholders so we don't by accident forget anyone. One of the challenges with group exercises is that you know sometimes not everyone agrees. So in a workshop, we did a lot of voting and consensus building. My role as a facilitator is to help people make their own self assessment of what is working and often more importantly what isn't working related to governance of the protected area. This means carefully listening to people's experiences as well as their suggestions for how the situation could be improved. For this governance assessment, I led a team of two other facilitators and we collected information through interviewing people and group discussions. Here is an example of how people run Lake Buru fear. After collecting this information, the Facultation team comes together, analyzes the data, we review and discuss the principles and understand more of the challenges and strengths to these principles. In cases where we find two or more sources to governance challenge your strength, we always add it to the finding and then we can later put it for validation. This validation takes place at the final stakeholder workshop, including everybody who has been part of the process. They are all invited to come together, review but also discuss the findings. One most important thing is that they come with ways to make this move forward but also their own ideas for action to the challenges that have been identified. All in all, a governance assessment lasts about five to ten days. My take home message is that if we understand and deeply address issues of governance and equity, we are more likely to achieve our conservation goals.