From July 29 to 30, 2014, the city of Douala hosted the Workshop of the Inaugural session of the Expert Committees of the Central African Forest Governance Working Group, organize by COMIFAC with the financial support of ECCAS through the EU-funded ECOFAC V programme, the World Bank’s MSP project, JICA and GIZ.

The pivotal meeting held to launch the operations of the GTGF Expert Committees and ensure ownership of the committees’s tasks by its members, attracted close to 63 people from all backgrounds. It was built around plenary session presentations on a range of topics including: the organization, functioning and role of key institutional actors and the GTGF roadmap; sustainability of forestry in Central Africa thanks to the fight against corruption; the methodology for developing the forest sector’s corruption risk map; Preliminary results of the study on the review of VPA FLEGT in Central Africa; and studies on the social impacts of FSC certification and the artisanal timber sector in the DRC. Group sessions held after the plenary sessions discussed policy and legislation, legality and forest certification, transparency and the fight against corruption in the forestry sector, the artisanal and informal timber sector and decentralized forest management.

 The discussions which followed the presentations and feedback from group work, allowed participants to make strong recommendations on improving GTGF’s functioning and ensuring its sustainability over time.

Details on the conduct of the meeting and all the recommendations can be read in the final communiqué on the workshop available for download below: The FInal Communiqué