SOUTH-SOUTH SAFEGUARDS LEARNING EVENT - ACCRA, GHANA -12-13 JUNE 2018

Dear all,

You can use this forum to continue the discussion started at the Africa regional exchange workshop on country approaches to safeguards. This way, we hope you can keep in touch with colleagues and share relevant resources.
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Getting the discussion started by sharing, what I think are the key challenges for SIS design in Africa, synthesised from all the group work and plenary discussions. What do you think? Do you agree? Do you have other ideas?

i. Institutional collaboration, information sharing and availability. Engaging government institutions, with a role to play in SIS design and operations, outside the forestry sector requires the appropriate incentives, mandates and capacities to be in place. Expectations of payments for government information jeopardises cost-effective SIS development in some African countries; in others, existing information systems, identified on paper, prove not to be operational in practice.

ii. Cost of SIS operations, particularly information collection is perceived to be high and funding sources remain elusive. Relatively ample funding has been made available for the initial capital SIS design processes (through REDD+ readiness technical assistance initiatives such as FCPF and UN-REDD), but many countries have yet to identify the costs of, and funding sources for, running their SIS once built.

iii. Multiple safeguards frameworks applied at different scales need to be accommodated in the national SIS. Different donors have different safeguards applied to the REDD+ actions that they are financing, or making results-based payments for, at different scales. Information will need to be aggregated from the subnational to the national level. National-level institutions running the SIS will need to aggregate information from multiple subnational sources in different formats.

iv. Parallel SIS design and national REDD+ strategy processes. As with countries in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, a number of African nations highlighted that it is very challenging to determine SIS information needs and structure without clarity on the specific REDD+ actions the country is expecting to undertake under its national REDD+ strategy. As such, preliminary SIS designs are likely to need iterative revision as national REDD+ strategy processes come to a conclusion.

v. Cost-effective monitoring methods, demonstrating outcomes on the ground, are a challenge to identify for some of the more advanced African countries. Two key technical challenges, in particular, present themselves: 1) how demonstrate attribution of environmental and social outcomes to REDD+ implementation, as well as the respecting of safeguards; and 2) what level of sampling intensity is appropriate to capture these outcomes at a reasonable cost?
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