With shared determination, participants in a sub-regional workshop held from 25 to 27 May 2017 in Douala, laid the groundwork for reflection on a harmonized process for collecting COMIFAC data, while securing the gains from existing processes.

The Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC) is known to have several forest and environmental data collection tools such as the database of the Observatory of Central African Forests (OFAC) which has a spatial component "Atlas-COMIFAC on land use in Central Africa", as well as the  CONVERGENCE MONITORING platform, which tracks indicators of the revised COMIFAC Convergence Plan. Though each of these tools is matched with a corresponding data collection process at country level, interoperability gaps still remain. This raises several issues for COMIFAC, principally the following:

• A waste of effort and time (lack of efficiency): with various processes at times concurrently mobilizing resources to collect the same information;
• Discrepancies spotted in the production of the same data: Descriptive information or metadata for the same data collected will vary from one process to another.

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