Knowledge and effective policies for environmental management (KEPEM)

The GOM will receive a cash grant of $33 million for use in servicing multilateral debt. Funds will be disbursed in four tranches conditioned on GOM actions to: (1) develop the institutional capacity to implement the EAP; (2) facilitate local natural resource management (NRM) initiatives; and (3) increase natural resource revenue generation and expenditures. TA in support of these activities will be provided under 6870113. The first component will develop the capacity of the National Office of the Environment (ONE), a new agency which is responsible for coordinating implementation of the EAP. ONE will develop a policy formulation, monitoring, and evaluation system which will enable it to review annual work plans for environmental projects, coordinate environmental activities, help negotiate donor agreements for financial and technical support, assess lessons learned for refinement of EAP strategy, and guide legislative changes. The second component will address local policy and institutional constraints to improved NRM. Assessments will be conducted in selected areas where USAID is already active via the Sustainable Approaches to Viable Environmental Management (SAVEM) project (6870110) (which helps local users to conserve biological diversity in protected areas and encourages sustainable NRM in buffer zones). The assessments will address: (1) land and resource access and land use rights, including customary and formal regulations; (2) community-level revenue generation and expenditure authority, including the authority to levy and collect taxes, mobilize labor, and require in-kind contributions; and (3) local-level conflict resolution. These assessments will form the basis for regulatory modifications first at the local level, and possibly later on a wider scale. This component will foster NGO participation in NRM by helping the GOM to prepare legislation allowing NGOs to organize, raise and spend funds, and serve as partners with local associations in sustainable NRM. Under the third component, the GOM will take steps to increase revenue from natural resources for use in environmental conservation, revising the stumpage fee schedules for harvesting trees so as to better reflect market value and replacement cost and improving its system for billing and collecting stumpage fees. The GOM will agree to spend at least 50% of its forest revenues on improved natural forest management. It will also initiate, in conjunction with a forest inventory already underway, a pilot project (probably in Moramanga region) to establish the full linkage among revenue derived from stumpage fees, availability of inventory data, preparation of management plans, granting of logging permits, and more accurate assessment and invoicing of stumpage fees. As a second part of this component, the GOM will provide $12 million to capitalize a National Environmental Endowment Fund, as a continuous source of financing for environmental actions.