Posted on September, 11 2017

WWF has trained stakeholders on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (OS), also known as Adaptive Management (AM). The workshop lasted five days and involved 22 participants drawn from forestry and wildlife schools in Cameroon including ENEF Mbalmayo, Ecole de Faune de Garoua, University of Dschang, conservators of protected areas and NGOs from Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire.
 
Financed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW), the training was designed to “meet the aspirations of those who have no experience with project development, strategic planning and implementation of conservation projects,” stated Madam Anne Ntongho, Senior Monitoring Officer for WWF Cameroon.  “We assumed that all the participants are conservation oriented and are working towards safe-guarding our natural heritage through effective designing, implementation and monitoring,” Anne added.
 
 The Open Standards is an important tool to improve conservation delivery. The standards present a set of tools and guidance suitable for key conservation institutions, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, and natural resource colleges and universities to move from general understanding of conservation planning to actual application for a range of projects and programs, in order to tackle wildlife conservation challenges and create impact for a living planet.
 
“There is a growing need within the Central Africa region to increase the number of practitioners who are qualified to use these tools effectively, especially in conservation project designing, implementation and monitoring,” Anne said.
 
 At the end of the training, participants drafted four projects on four thematic issues focusing on the geographic regions of Cameroon.  They include Protected Area Management in Southeast region, gorilla habituation project in the South region, climate change and energy project in the North region and livelihood/human targets project in the South West region.  Participants were called upon to commit to support other colleagues and communities in applying the Open Standards method to their work.