Advancing Sustainable Forest Governance
AFF harnesses evidence, capacity building, and multi-stakeholder partnerships to transform African forestry livelihoods.
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Context
As more stakeholders in Africa get involved with forest and tree management for a variety of goals – economic production, positive interactions with agriculture, environmental services, etc. - the demand for relevant and reliable information and knowledge is growing. Achieving SFM in Africa is particularly constrained by poor access to relevant knowledge and technologies, partly because its current availability is fragmented, and suppliers and users extremely diverse. The situation is worsened by the fact that there are very limited knowledge products specifically targeted towards stakeholders outside the forestry profession (i.e. communities, farmers, rural entrepreneurs, etc.). In the absence of systematic and targeted management of, and access to, technical knowledge, projects and programmes are not learning from previous experiences. In addition, a significant amount of data and information used in Africa is accessed from sources outside the continent, and in many instances such data, information and knowledge are used as proxies in making decisions in Africa with the obvious result that there is often poor matches between technologies and needs.
Knowledge brokerage (KB) can play an important role in managing these gaps and in supporting stakeholders within and outside the forestry sector to access relevant and timely information. KB is broadly defined as a set of intermediary activities that link knowledge production and use. KB can range from making information more accessible and understandable to helping different actors develop a shared understanding of an issue. The intent is to help decision-makers acquire, evaluate and use expertise that they would not otherwise obtain or incorporate into their decision-making. The rapid developments in ICT offer an unprecedented range of possibilities for improved and more efficient and relevant KB, offering greater reach, more access and new technologies for storing, filtering and translating knowledge into new formats.
Examples of subjects, challenges and opportunities to be addressed
Gathering information; continuing process of gathering useful and relevant data of improved quality from concluded, on-going and planned projects and programmes, from both AFF’s own activities and those by other relevant actors; determine knowledge needs of Africa’s forest sector on an on-going basis and select relevant and reliable data and information that meet the needs of different actors; interconnect different international, regional and national forestry resources information systems to enable efficient ways of data access.
Disseminate information; analyse, disaggregate and make available in user-friendly form (adapted to different user groups, incl. non-forestry professionals) existing data, information and user-designed knowledge products; further develop and improve tools (IT, data-bases, media, publications, etc.) and capacities within AFF for dissemination of information; evaluate global, regional and national forestry financing opportunities and link them to stakeholders at relevant levels.
Impact assessment; develop effective tools and mechanisms to monitor, assess and follow up on uptake, outcomes and impacts of AFF’s products and services, and report to appropriate constituencies.