By Ngalame Elias
The Forest Stewardship Council, FSC has been pushing to empower forest communities especially in Africa with information and pathways to achieve forest certification.
The community forest certification drive was the essence of a two day workshop September 12-13, 2024 organized at Hotel Toungou in Yaounde by FSC,bringing together some 20 representatives of community forest, community forest operation managers, representatives of the Ministry of forestry and wildlife and other stakeholders.
The representative of the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife lauded the initiative by FSC to organize the workshop to better abreast the community forest managers and other stakeholders on the FOREST Certification process.
“The Ministry of forestry and wildlife is ever ready to collaborate with and drive geared towards sustainable forest management,” Sanama Elie of the cooperation unit, MINFOF who represented the minister pointed out.
According to a Press Release from FSC despite enormous forest resource potential in Africa, only 1.3Mha of community forest are certified to date.
The information however notes that the importance of forest certification for sustainable forest management has been readily accepted by most communities in Africa including Cameroon and are ready to understand and embrace the process.
This potential of community forests for promoting forest certification to achieve more sustainable management of African forests motivated the activity of the project “Certifying forests and plantations managed by communities and small businesses in Central and West Africa” implemented by FSC, the release stated.
According to FSC policy manager for Africa Willy Lawyer, “there’s an urgent need to promote sustainable forest management in Africa and community forests are key in driving this goal.”
In Cameroon, a review of the functioning of community forests was carried out in order to identify the guidelines for initiating a dynamic of certification of community forests in October 2023, the workshop organizers said.
“ The general objective was to analyze the feasibility of certifying community forests in Cameroon based on FSC approaches and solutions” Willy Lawyer said.
“At the end of the study, it was thus necessary to do a restitution to the community forests concerned, raising the awareness of these communities about forest certification and its opportunities, in order to support them in this process. It is within this framework that FSC Congo Basin is organizing this workshop,” he explained.
The general objective accordingly, is to promote the benefits of FSC certification solutions for community forests and encourage their support based on the approach proposed by the project “Certifying forests and plantations managed by communities and small businesses in Central and West Africa,” the FSC release notes.
In his opening remarks Patrick Kanga of FSC , noted that the workshop was geared to represent and share the results of the report on the identification of opportunities for FCs for forest certification in Cameroon, arouse the interest of FCs and raising their awareness of FSC forest certification and its opportunities, with a focus on group certification, present the prospects for support towards certification, create a framework for discussion between workshop participants, collect relevant recommendations for support tailored to community forests.
He called on participants to take active part in the discussions, make concrete proposals that will help advance the forest certification process.
“ FSC wants to know what the needs of the community forest managers and representatives are, their challenges and expectations that will help facilitate the certification process” Kanga said.
These concerns and potential solutions were expressed during the group work at the workshop.
Ondobo Jules, one of the community forest representative from Mintoum in the South region expressed the need for exchange visits with other countries in Africa like where forest certification is a success story.
“ Such a visit will help us better understand and replicate their experience back in our community forest in Cameroon,” he said.
