Civic Response organised a capacity update and lessons sharing workshop for community monitors and verifiers.
The workshop which took place in October, 2021 in Accra, was attended by sixty-eight (68) community monitors and verifiers from Real Time Monitoring (RTM) implementing communities across the country.
Participants shared their experiences working in the fields, lessons learnt, challenges encountered as well us updated their skills.
The breakout of COVID-19 in 2019 disrupted Civic Response’s work on RTM, especially community engagements. Civic Response was unable to embark on field verification of alerts due to restrictions imposed by COVID-19. This resulted in the dwindling of forest infraction alerts sent to the ForestLink platform.
In August 2021, Civic Response embarked on a field mission to understand from the monitors the reason behind the drastic reduction of alerts .
From the field visit, it was observed that the alerts reduced due to some technical challenges as well as the lack of feedback. The workshop was, therefore, organised to address these challenges.
Civic Response with the support of RFUK has trained 75 community monitors on how to use the forestlink SMS mobile application to collect data on forest infringement since 2018. Since that period, community monitors have been sending forest infraction alerts to the forestlink platform.