African NGO-Government Partnership for Sustainable Biodiversity Action

The programme is based on implementation of the Important Bird Area (IBA) process. The IBA process is the application of internationally agreed criteria to define the global importance of sites for biodiversity conservation at a national level, followed by a cycle of monitoring, action and advocacy to ensure the conservation of sites, in perpetuity. National and local capacity for achieving biodiversity conservation is built through the process. Four stages have been defined: 1) setting-up the institutional framework; 2) site identification and survey plus inventory compilation; 3) setting priorities and implementing advocacy, monitoring and action for key sites; 4) establishing a sustainable management cycle.