SP-SFIF Regional Activities of the Strategic Partnership for a Sustainable Fisheries Investment Fund in the Large Marine Ecosystems of Sub Saharan Africa - Tranche 1

The objectives of this Grant to support the Regional Activities of the Strategic Partnership are to: -Strengthen regional coordination in order to ensure complementarity among country-level and regional projects, in particular in respect to management of trans-boundary resources; -Promote learning and information exchange at the regional level to ensure that the lessons from successes and failures of country and LME level investments are adequately disseminated; and -Encourage direct financial support in the SSA countries for the necessary governance (i.e. policy, legal, and institutional) reforms and sector adjustments to manage their fisheries sustainably in a way that ensures a distribution of benefits that will contribute to poverty reduction and food security; -Assist individual coastal countries to build the capacity to participate in the ongoing GEF-led Large Marine Ecosystem (LME) projects and regional fisheries bodies (RFBs) as well as collaborate through these initiatives to implement management measures for the marine ecosystems and the trans-boundary fisheries resources and/or fishing fleets that would be more appropriate at the sub-regional scale (e.g. sub-regional monitoring, control and surveillance systems, management of fishing capacity, sub-regional research initiatives, networks of marine protected areas (MPAs), etc.).