The foundation for Parks and Reserves of Côte d’ivoire recently funded a training workshop for officials of the Ivorian Office of Parks and Reserves on open standards for the management of conservation projects and programs.

The open standards for conservation practice were developed by a consortium of conservation organizations known as the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP). The mission of this consortium is to advance conservation practice through the development, testing and promotion of principles and tools to credibly assess and improve the effectiveness of conservation actions. These standards focus on five key steps in the project/program management cycle (Figure 1). Versions 1.0 (2004) and 2.0 (2007) have evolved to the most recent version 3.0 which dates from 2013.

As part of its 2020 activities, the Foundation for Parks and Reserves of Côte d’Ivoire organized a capacity-building workshop for thirty managers of the Ivorian Office of Parks and reserves (OIPR) in Abidjan, in collaboration with WWF (the World Wildlife Fund).

The main objective of this training is to initiate the use of open standards for the management of conservation projects and programmes within the OIPR through a practical capacity building session with the use of the MIRADI software.

Specifically, the workshop allowed participants to have a common understanding of open conservation standards, to establish differences with the approaches currently used by the OIPR, to develop at least three action plans through the implementation of the conceptualization and planning stages of actions and monitoring for the Taï, Comoe and Banco national parks, to design the follow-up plans associated with each action plan and to develop a roadmap for monitoring the implementation of the enforcement activities. This will allow in the medium and long term to ensure an improvement in the management of the network of protected areas of Côte d’ivoire according to the standards of the partnership for conservation measures.