A workshop on “Strengthening partnerships in the fight against desertification”, organized by the High Commission for Water and Forestry in Morocco (HCEFLCD), in cooperation with UNDP, GTZ, representatives of the European Union, the European Commission, and other development partners, and co-financed by the GM, was held in Rabat, Morocco, on 6 February 2007, in the context of the International Year of Deserts and Desertification (IYDD).
The workshop provided an interesting opportunity for participants to review Morocco’s National Action Programme (NAP) and UNCCD implementation, with a view to strengthening partnerships at national and international levels.
Morocco – a country that ratified the Convention in 1996 – “has been able to grab the opportunities offered by the UNCCD, but the work done so far is not sufficient, since the magnitude of the problem is well beyond what countries mobilize through their domestic budget and what is pledged and disbursed by the donor community””, said Mr Mohamed Badraoui, Director for Combating Desertification and Nature Preservation at HCEFLCD.
“We have to work with a long-term perspective through the decades, if we want to invert the trends of desertification, in a region where drought will be even stronger in the near future”. In this new context, “we will have to use water even more carefully and properly”, he added.
The CCD projects in Morocco, Dr Badraoui went on to note, are shifting from a sectoral approach - with each department working on specific tasks, to a more coordinated and integrated methodology, that will allow people to work together and share a common vision of development.
It is in this context that the GM and the HCEFLCD are exploring together new and innovative ways of resource mobilization, such as the use of climate change financing mechanisms for the elaboration of a national forestry strategy, the improvement of decentralized cooperation for the benefit of local communities from arid zones, as well as the development of South-to-south cooperation, as a means of making optimal use of local capacities within developing countries.
For more information, please contact:
Mr Youssef Brahimi, Programme Coordinator, South-to-South Cooperation, Africa
Tel. +39 06 5459 2584
y.brahimi (at) ifad.org
Mr Youssef Brahimi, Programme Coordinator, South-to-South Cooperation, Africa
Tel. +39 06 5459 2584
y.brahimi (at) ifad.org
