Project Description
West Africa’s remaining tropical forests transcend borders and are globally significant for their rich and unique biological diversity. The conservation and restoration of these forests are crucial to maintaining West Africa’s biological heritage and critical ecosystem services while providing West African countries a pathway to meeting their global carbon emissions reduction targets, ultimately reducing the extent and effects of climate change.
Recognizing the need to protect future generations from adverse environmental impacts, the USAID-funded WABiLED Program focuses on three core objectives: combating wildlife trafficking and enhancing great ape conservation; reducing deforestation, forest degradation, and biodiversity loss in key transboundary forest landscapes; and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing carbon sequestration from forestry and land use.
Based on its Theory of Change, WABiLED will achieve these objectives through:
- Working with partners such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to strengthen the capacity of national and regional networks and institutions to enforce wildlife trafficking laws across the region.
- Implementing regional and transboundary cooperation and biodiversity conservation strategies in the key forested countries of Guinea, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone
- Improving capacity for economic planning and development of low emissions development strategies (LEDS) to reduce West Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions, thus contributing to national and global climate commitments.
One example of how WABiLED supports efforts to reduce wildlife trafficking, deforestation, and forest degradation is the capacity-building and support of female community eco-guards through its grants program and grantee, the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. The female community ecoguards are responsible for raising awareness of the harm of illegal hunting and deforestation and collecting data on wildlife and illegal human activities in the forest.
WABiLED also works with NGOs, governments, the private sector, and local communities in four transboundary forest learning landscapes in the Upper Guinean Forest ecosystem that are rich in biodiversity and provide critical habitat for the Western Chimpanzee and other rare and endangered species. Directly and through grantees with subject matter expertise and presence on the ground, WABiLED’s support includes implementing transboundary management agreements and action plans, strengthening capacity for effective management, and harmonizing data collection and enforcement regulations to ensure consistent application across the landscapes. WABiLED also works with partners and local communities to identify sustainable livelihood options to generate income and conserve key forest resources.
Additionally, WABiLED works with national and landscape stakeholders, including grantee Fauna and Flora (F&F) and EUCORD, to achieve improved tenure security, especially for vulnerable and disadvantaged populations, and other incentives for low emissions land management of protected areas, community resources, and private investments. This is achieved by mapping and documenting land tenure arrangements and supporting land tenure recognition processes, which feed into the design and implementation of Low Emissions Development activities across WABiLED’s four learning landscapes.
Three core cross-cutting components support all of WABiLED’s work: gender, youth, and social inclusion (GYSI), communications and monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
These cross-cutting pillars are integrated into the activities for all three core Objectives, leading to effective implementation and monitoring, maintaining a GYSI lens in programming, and strengthening the capacity of partners and community constituents to monitor and effectively communicate impacts, outcomes, and results.
WABiLED builds on the foundation of its five-and-a-half-year predecessor program, the USAID-funded West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change (WA BiCC) program.
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