The East African region is undeniably a critically important landscape as the mountains, savannahs and forests of Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique , Tanzania, and Uganda support ecological and economic functions for people and the several thousand plant and animal species endemic to the region. WWF Tanzania, through the East Africa Regional Forest Programme (EARFP), has therefore adopted an integrated, transboundary approach in its Country Strategic Plan I & II to consider – at a regional scale – conservation and climate change agendas and drivers as they relate to the livelihoods of local, forest-dependent communities in these countries and their respective national economic growth and development. The EARFP was built on the foundation of WWF’s Coastal East Africa Initiative’s (CEAI) Sustainable Forests Strategy to maintain regional coordination and collaboration, scale-up regional interventions, maximize influence to national governments and pursue WWF’s vision of nature and people co-existing for the benefit of one another. While the CEAI’s Forest Strategy concentrated its regional efforts in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, the EARFP’s Strategy (2016 – 2020) extended its scope to include Uganda and Madagascar in order to address illegal trade in timber and embrace regional collaboration among countries to improve forest governance. The transformative results and impacts of the EARFP programme have been exemplary and, through this report, we are pleased to shine a light on some of the programme’s achievements and lessons learnt over the past 5 years, through adaptive, collaborative and committed efforts.
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Results and Impacts from East Africa Forest Conservation
