CAMEROON: COMMUNITY FORESTS GO DIGITAL

Communities will now benefit more from the exploitation of their forests thanks to the SVCL. The SVCL is supported by a mobile and web-based application designed to monitor the legality and traceability of CF wood. During 2018, the managers of five community forests (CFs) in the Department of Haut-Nyong in the East Region of Cameroon have taken on board the regulatory requirements in terms of legality and traceability of timber from their forests, in particular the carrying out of geo-referenced inventories. Barthélémy Nkamba of the GIC Amande, a beneficiary of this project says: “I had never touched a GPS or a compass and I knew nothing about forest inventory practices. Today, I am proud to have this knowledge that will allow us to improve the management of our community forests. This is a spin-off from the implementation of the Community Legality Verification System (CVLS), a project designed and implemented since 2016 by the Service d’Appui aux Initiatives Locales de Développement (SAILD) in the Eastern Region, with funding from the FAO-EU FLEGT Programme. Curbing illegal exploitation In order to combat illegal logging, the State of Cameroon and the European Union signed in 2010 the Voluntary Partnership Agreement for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (VPA-FLEGT). This was intended to help curb illegal logging. To distinguish between forest products of legal and illegal origin, the VPA provides for the establishment of a Legality Verification System (LVS) based on the second generation Computerised Forest Information Management System, called SIGIF II, which leads to the issuance of FLEGT legality certificates and FLEGT licences for all forest titles. Community forests, disqualified in such a system, find in the SVLS proposed by SAILD, a tool to raise their level of management and ensure the traceability of their timber. The CVLS includes technical and technological tools (procedures, computer applications) for monitoring the legality and traceability of CF timber. Collaboration SAILD-MINFOF As far as we were concerned,” says Barthélémy Pala of the KAME community forest, “our difficulty was in the scaling of the wood. A buyer would arrive and load the wood into his truck before estimating himself the volume he had loaded. We had no argument to contest this. We were making a lot of losses and were not managing to carry out the community projects we had planned. Now that we are aware of this, we hope that SAILD will extend the logging initiative”. Thanks to the good collaboration between SAILD and the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife (MINFOF) on the ground in the East, by 2018 SVCL will have enabled communities living in the forests to make the most of their forests by mastering techniques and tools for legal logging.