SW4SW Regional Dialogue in Africa

The Johannesburg event was the second regional dialogue in Africa, following on from the regional dialogue for francophone Africa held in Cameroon 28-30 May 2019. The purpose of the regional dialogues is to raise awareness and build capacity to increase contributions of wood value chains to sustainable development and climate change mitigation. The Johannesburg dialogue brought together key stakeholders in forestry and wood value chains from the rest of Africa. Participants included delegates from Southern, East, West and Lusophone African countries.

In summary, the priority action points arising from the meeting were:

• integrating farm forestry to scaled wood value chains;
  
• improving market access to value-added wood products (in some cases even creating markets – e.g. public procurement);
  
• application of new technologies (more efficient use of raw materials and value-added products/new products);
  
• capacity building (in finance & technologies);
  
• finance – especially private sources; and
  
• cross-sectoral policies that support the development of sustainable farm forestry-based wood value chains.
  

The SW4SW is expected to continue with concrete actions to support a regional vision for sustainable wood value chains.