Design and delivery of workshops for representatives of government agencies, civil society organizations, and private sector companies in the forestry sector.

Through the 2012-2015 Forest Governance Markets and Climate (FGMC) Programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID), CIDT is empowering and strengthening the capacity of key actors from timber exporting countries to improve national forest governance for the benefit of forest-dependent communities.

One of the key outputs of FGMC is the design and delivery of workshops for representatives of government agencies, civil society organizations, and private sector companies working in the forestry sector within countries that participate in the VPA-FLEGT process. These workshops aim to improve participants’ capacity to design results-based projects and elaborate successful proposals to secure funding from diverse donors to implement FLEGT in timber-producing countries.

Find out more

• Contact CIDT Project Manager Dr Aurelian Mbzibain.

What role do CIDT play?

CIDT’s role is to design the workshop programme, create the learning materials, and facilitate the workshops in country. To date, the following countries have benefitted from these trainings: Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, and Republic of Congo (RoC). Guyana is the next country planned. Delivery has been done in both English and French so far.

CIDT try as much as possible to respond to national priorities and to support local institutions to organize the workshops. We provide input on the participant selection criteria, yet most of the application process and country-level logistics are handled by local partners. Wherever possible, we ensure that Ministries and FLEGT Focal Points at national level are involved in the planning and delivery of the workshops, as well as their follow-up. CIDT’s workshop facilitators also offer virtual mentoring to the participants for a limited time following the workshop, in order to complete the training outputs.

Workshop content

These are highly participatory workshops that take participants through the seven key steps of project/programme design and introduce the concept of Project and Programme Cycle Management (PPCM) as well as key elements of Project Management. Through intensive group work, participants gain familiarity with tools for results-based management (RBM), including the Logical Framework Approach (LFA). Through this process, they learn tips for formulating solid objectives, sustainable activities, SMART indicators with verifiable data sources, and hypotheses based on risk analysis. Stakeholder analysis is a continuous theme throughout the workshop.

The programme is designed to help participants transition from project design and Log Frame development into the actual writing of a proposal – both the technical proposal and the financial proposal. Therefore, session cover topics such as: workplanning and budgeting; project context and justification; sustainability and exit strategies; communications and visibility; capitalization of lessons learned; synergies and complementarities; and a wide range of other important elements, such as eligibility criteria, donor and country priorities, planning for proposal development, and more.

A combination of case studies and real life examples are presented and critiqued; and when possible, live calls for proposal are used to guide the development of Log Frames and actual proposal documents.

The main outputs from each workshop are a complete Log Frame for 4 to 5 project ideas, as well as either notes or draft texts for proposals that can be elaborated following the workshop.

Workshop image galleries