Women in Tanzania with seedlings for reforestation. Photo by USAID Africa
The Eastern Africa Forest observatory aims at providing a better understanding of the trends and threats to forests in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique in order to support better decision-making to improve the management of Forests. The Regional Forest Observatory will contribute to the collation and sharing of relevant data and information on Forests in East Africa and will provide support on decision-making processes to governments across the region.
The forest observatory federates diverse sources of data and provides the users with a cross-cutting vision on the forests sector in the four countries by hosting a regional database and a website for the regional forest observatory. This will be regularly updated by the integration of new data sets regularly, when deemed necessary. The data and information compiled in this observatory has been provided by the four countries and thus arranged per country.
The idea is to create a holistic monitoring system of East Africa forests in order to regularly update the knowledge database, to identify the important issues for future strategies and programs, and to allow for a fine analysis of these parameters for combating illegal logging and destruction. The ultimate goal is to re-enforce ownership by national services in charge of forest to include environmental information in the decision making processes. This will require the establishment of the mechanisms of data exchange, harmonization, and reinforcement of capacities for different monitoring systems and for the overall observatory, and the awareness raising of main target institutions and audience.
