Leading the change - Civil Society, Rights and Environment: Sustainable Forestry in East Africa Thematic hub <b>Problem and context description</b>
	  <p>All across the Eastern Africa region, particularly in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda, forest resources face numerous pressures that undermine their viability and potential to contribute to national economies, improving livelihoods for forest-dependent communities and ecological services. Direct threats to forest in Eastern Africa arise from unsustainable or illegal logging for timber or charcoal, or conversion of forests to cropland and other land uses. These threats contribute to both deforestation and forest degradation with some countries such as Uganda having an annual deforestation rate of 
2.3 % exceeding the world average of 0.2 %. Threats are driven by a number of factors such as inadequate capacity of forest-dependent communities, limited financial capacity and resources to unlock the potential from Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs), inadequate governance and low accountability and growing intra-regional and inter-regional illegal trade for timber and other forest products.</p>
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<p>All across the region, local CSOs have taken central role in enabling and supporting local communities through challenging forest governance regimes and states’ status quo on forest control, and advocating for rights of forest-dependent communities. Despite this critical role, local CSOs space has continued to diminish within the region particularly due to uneven political landscape and increased controls by states on operations by CSOs. Also, the reduced funding base and limited unrestricted funding sources have continued to undermine CSOs’ capacity to sustainably meet both their institutional mandate (i.e. responding to their constituencies) and needs (e.g. leadership and human resource base).</p>
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<p>The bottlenecks facing the forestry sector in Eastern Africa signals an urgent need for WWF to continue to employ a robust regional approach particularly in investing in learning, capacity building and shifting best practices across the region influence governance regimes and reverse the current situation. While WWF has for the last six years (2011-2016) invested in laying a good foundation for transformational change in the forest sector in the region (e.g. strengthening CSOs capacity).While these efforts towards local CSOs and their forums have been essential to create the momentum and necessary foundations to influence forest management and trade, gaps still exist to enable CSOs’ to learn and explore from other countries within the region. The gaps towards local CSOs include inadequate space to learn on innovations to enable forest dependent communities to unlock full potential from forest resources (e.g. access to markets and NTFPs), targeted funding to enable CSOs forest working groups to influence regional processes, and limited knowledge and mechanisms to learn on organisational transition in institutional leadership.</p>
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<b>Programme goals</b>
<p>The ultimate desired outcome of this programme is that people in Eastern Africa are effectively controlling decisions and receiving full benefits from forest resources and exercising their responsibility for ensuring that forest ecosystems in selected WWF priority areas in the region are sustainably managed.</p>
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<b>Programme activities</b>
<p>WWF designed the Eastern Africa Sustainable Forest Programme to specifically tackle unsustainable logging and trade and to promote sustainable forest management practices. For this proposed initiative, the planned activities will aim:</p>
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<li><u>To promote sustainable forest management practices</u> that enable learning in innovations in locally driven business models in forest-dependent communities across the region. The activities will promote learning and South-South exchange on various organisational structures that enable equitable access to markets and finance, existing partnerships types with private sector (i.e. mechanisms for contract management and negotiations), and community experience in developing and managing forest-based business plans.</li>
<li><u>To strengthen forest governance, civil society organisations and inter-governmental collaboration at regional level.</u> The activities will seek to improve cross-border collaboration between government agencies and CSOs. These will include: (i) supporting dialogue between forest agencies across the region to build joint efforts to deter illegal trade and in particular supporting operationalization of regional agreements (e.g. Zanzibar declaration on illegal trade in timber and other forest products); (ii) supporting dialogue (e.g. Annual East Africa Timber Trade Stakeholders’ Forum) and regional processes in partnerships with Regional Economic Commissions (RECs), CSOs and private sector e.g. East African Community (EAC); (iii) working directly with government agencies on commitment in bilateral agreements in a collaborative and facilitative manner including customs relations; (iv) and strengthening regional CSOs dialogue, sharing of lessons (e.g. leadership skills) to advocate for change and hold government and private sector accountable.</li>
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