Managers Trained in GIS for Protected Areas Biodiversity and Management

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The Observatory for Biodiversity and Protected Areas in West Africa (OBAPAO) has organized a five (05) day workshop in Geographic information system (GIS) for protected area managers in West Africa.

The training which took place from 18th to 22nd May 2022 in Dakar, Senegal, drew 16 participants from five (5) West African countries (The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria). The participants included officers from environment protection agencies and protected area authorities. This training was a follow up to the first session was held in Conakry (Republic of Guinea) earlier this year (12th to 15th April 2022), which brought together representatives from Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal.

Group photograph of training participants

In his opening remarks, Oumar Sarr, Director of Administration and Finance (Centre de Suivi Ecologique) urged the participants to take advantage of the training to increase their knowledge in GIS and its applications.

Mr. Oumar Sarr delivering his opening remarks

Mr. Ignatius Kweku Williams, facilitator for the event, noted that protected areas continue to face numerous threats (encroachment and habitat degradation), it is thus necessary to improve the monitoring mechanisms employed by these institutions by augmenting their efforts with GIS based solutions.

Participants were taken through practical sessions of vector and raster data processing, introduction to the Regional Reference Information System (RRIS) and updating protected area boundaries.
  
Trainer, Ibrahima Almamy Wade taking participants through editing of protected area boundaries

Mr. Abdulwahab Abbas (Nigeria) and Mr. Joseph Gbassa (Sierra Leone) expressed their gratitude towards the observatory for conducting the training in a very practical and hands-on approach. They appealed to the organizers to continue to conduct more of such trainings, while promising to transfer the knowledge they acquired to their colleagues back home.
 
Participants from Sierra Leone at the training

OBAPAO is one of the central pillars of the BIOPAMA Program comprising of the Centre de Suivi Ecologique (CSE), the Regional Marine Centre of the University of Ghana (RMC-UG), the Regional Network of Marine Protected Areas in West Africa (RAMPAO) and the Centre Regional AGRHYMET (CRA). It is an initiative of the ACP Group of countries funded by the European Union's 11th European Development Fund and implemented jointly by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC-EC).

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