Financing Conservation in Africa

On 8 November 2002, the Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG) and the InterAgency Planning Group (IPG) on Environmental Funds held a meeting on "Financing Conservation in Africa". The meeting, organized by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Conservation Finance Alliance and hosted and chaired by World Resources Institute, provided an opportunity to review current sustainable finance activities and tools, and to discuss their implementation for mobilizing long-term financial resources to support biodiversity conservation in Africa. The main focus was to ensure that these important tools and mechanisms are shared with the African partners in the field, and to assess current conservation finance needs in Africa.

Through presentations and discussion, the meeting explored:

• Lessons learned from existing environmental funds in Africa based on the April 2002 Conference for African Environmental Funds;
• Examples of various conservation finance tools and mechanisms; and
• An overview of the upcoming Sustainable Finance (SF) stream at World Parks Congress.

The objectives of the meeting were to:

• Develop a better understanding of current conservation finance initiatives in Africa, such as the status of African environmental funds;
• Learn about new training tools for assessing, designing, and implementing sustainable financing arrangements for conservation;
• Create support for the sustainable finance stream at the upcoming World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa in September 2003; and
• Identify priorities for future conservation finance initiatives in Africa