| LRCFP Convenes Partnership Confab On Community Forestry |
| Published on September 07, 2009 | Email To Friend Print Version
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By Kevin Tydehson
The Land Rights and Community Forestry Program (LRCFP), a program of the United States Agency for International development (USAID), convenes a daylong ‘Annual Review Meeting’ with its partners on tomorrow, 8 September 2009, in Sinkor.
The meeting aims to retrospect, reflect, and look to future developments on LRCFP and Community Forestry (CF) in Liberia, and will ultimately provide a platform for partners to make presentations from the perspectives of their organizations, in relation to community forestry in Liberia.
Key partners expected to make presentations include the Forestry Development Authority (FDA), the Governance Commission (GC), Action for Greater Harvest (AGRHA), National Adult Education Association of Liberia (NAEAL), and the Center for Justice and Peace Studies (CJPS), among others.
The meeting will also set the stage for the program’s outgoing Chief of Party (CoP), Dr. Ian Deshmukh, to do a public handover to Allen Turner, the incoming CoP.
Dr. Deshmukh played a pivotal role in setting up LRCFP, a legacy his successor will build on to move the program forward.
LRCFP is a USAID project assisting the FDA and forest-based communities to jointly manage Liberia’s forest lands.
Recent policy and legal reforms in Liberia’s forestry sector mandate FDA to empower and assist Liberian communities to manage their forest resources sustainably.
LRCFP works with FDA and other stakeholders to develop this capacity at all levels.
LRCFP works with Zor and Gba communities, north of Sanniquellie in Nimba County, and with Nitrian and Nimopoh communities, east of Greenville, in Sinoe County.
The project helps these communities understand their rights and responsibilities regarding forest resources in their customary lands, and how to undertake forest management activities that sustain these resources.
LRCFP uses this community-based experience to help FDA develop a national institutional framework for community forestry in Liberia.
The program provides support to FDA for training, technical analyses and recommendations, based on its experiences in Sinoe and Nimba, and experience in other countries that will enable communities to increasingly assume rights and responsibilities for managing their forest resources.
LRCFP also works with the newly mandated Land Commission to assist in developing policies that will lead to legally defined customary tenure rights in forest lands.
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