The East and Southern Africa Forest Observatory aims at providing streamlined information on the trends and threats to forests in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda in order to support better decision-making to improve the management of forests. The observatory seeks to foster data-sharing across the region to support collaboration in forest management and address common issues.
Following an initial prototype phase (2017-2018), OFESA is now in a consolidation phase (2020-2022) which entails two activities: first, creating a coherent governance framework which incentivizes and enables participating countries to share, use and analyze data; and second, ensuring that countries and regional organizations are provided with the information they need when they need it.
Ongoing activities include collaboration with various ministries and other regional and country-level actors to understand their needs, strengthen their capacity to collect data, and address gaps and data quality issues.
OFESA is jointly led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD). This initiative is funded by the European Union.
