The 4th Consortium Capacity Building Workshop & Reflection Meeting for the Landscapes and Environmental Agility across the Nation - LEAN project, has ended in Accra.

The 4-day meeting brought all partners under the LEAN Project together to gain knowledge, skills and capacity as well as address all concerns regarding the project in order to have a smooth, efficient and effective project implementation.

According to the Consortium Lead, Abena Dufie Woode, the Lead Implementation Partner, Rainforest Alliance, identified some implementation challenges that needed to be addressed for effective and efficient project implementation.

In an interview, she said, With the next round of interim reports due on 30th November 2023, and update requests from donors, it is expedient to meet as a consortium to build capacity to address the challenges affecting the EU LEAN Project.’

The Capacity Building Workshop focused on LandScale, Project Monitoring Platform (PMP), outcome of Baseline Survey, Communication and Visibility amongst others.

Speaking to Daniel Kofi Abu, Project Manager for Tropenbos Ghana and an implementing partner in the transitional landscape, he said he was looking forward to an enhanced collaboration at the community levels as the successful workshop has informed the whole team on how to re-strategize to achieve the overall goals of the project.

According to him, communities have embraced the LEAN Project and the concept of tree planting, ideals of climate change and relationship with government stakeholders have been empowered as they have recently completed processes of signing forest protection agreement with communities amongst many others.

In the transitional landscape, he said currently they have started actions on distribution of some livelihood interventions, and a lot of activities and training across 30 communities in areas like Integrated Landscape Management approaches and how these communities can integrate that to their everyday day life.

The organizations also hope to register every farmer in the landscape with the bio data’s on trees in order to sync them into the overall system that allows for fair equitable distribution of carbon preps.

Mr. Abu, however, added that the challenges that the project is facing is still not hindering the process. ‘We are seeing some challenges when it comes to adopting some of the new technologies and approaches that we are introducing in the communities, but we are hoping that some of these challenges will in very short term translate into opportunities.’

The LEAN project is working to address some major barriers in three (3) priority landscapes in Ghana – the High Forest Zone, Transition and Savannah landscapes and it aims to directly support national efforts to conserve biodiversity, improve the livelihoods of small-scale farmers, build climate resilience, and reduce emissions from land-use changes across the various zones.