The final workshop of the project “Forest and Landscape Restoration and Sustainable Land Management in the Sahel” will take place from 15 to 16 June 2023 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Approved in June 2017 with a backing of EUR 1.8 million from the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM), the Sahel project is implemented in Burkina Faso and the Niger by the Forest and Landscape Restoration Mechanism (FLRM) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with national and regional institutions. Its purpose is to contribute to forest and landscape restoration (FLR) and sustainable land management (SLM) in each country and to provide sustainable goods and services. The particularity of this project lies in the approach, based on supporting municipalities in project management and monitoring and evaluating FLR/SLM and income generating activities in the spirit of decentralization.

This final workshop was designed to meet the strategic objective to share knowledge at the regional and international levels. A multitude of partners and practitioners combined their expertise to achieve the results recorded in the two countries covered by the project. The expected results of the workshop include the following:

• experiences with decentralized management of forest resources are shared;
• tools for planning and monitoring FLR/SLM at the municipal level based on the biophysical reference situation are explained;
• support systems for local authorities to establish a communal approach and the successful transfer of project management for FLR/SLM are shared;
• good practices in FLR/SLM project management by local authorities within the framework of the FFEM-funded project are discussed; and
• the overall implementation of the project is reviewed and a roadmap for the project's closure is defined.