Parliamentarians and civil society organizations from the Congo Basin countries have agreed to help improve governance in the forest sector. The perfect agreement was achieved in Yaounde, at the regional workshop held from June 22 to 23, 2015, which was jointly organized by the Centre for International Development and Training (CIDT), Fern, the Forest Peoples Program (FPP) and the Plateforme Forêts et Communautés (CFP).

The main aim of the meeting was to boost cooperation between parliamentarians and civil society organizations (CSOs), on forest governance issues particularly as part of the VPA / FLEGT and REDD + processes in the Congo Basin.

Close to fifty people took part in the event, including parliamentary delegations, members of civil society, indigenous peoples and journalists from Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ivory Coast.

For two days they scrutinized bottlenecks to good governance and seized the opportunity to submit recommendations for forest governance improvement in the Congo Basin. Some of the recommendations were:

• Introduce programs on forest governance into audiovisual programming in countries where they do not yet exist;
• In countries where they do exist, the in-country VPA/FLEGT committees should provide content to populate the programs;
• Encourage partners to provide technical and financial support to bolster collaboration between CSOs, parliamentarians and journalists.

Photo: Merline Touko Tchoko

For more information on the conduct of the workshop, please see the final communique below: