l Accessible technologies and FPIC: independent monitoring with forest communities in Cameroon 155
communities to advocate for their rights.
Each CBO accompanied between two to
five communities.
• The British High Commission funded
the first phase of the project.
• Helveta Ltd funded the second phase,
provided project equipment, supervised
the CBO’s activities and securely stored the
data collected. They also recruited staff to
facilitate the overall project. Téodyl
Nkuintchua, co-author of this article,
managed the project over two years as a
Helveta Ltd employee.
• John Nelson (Forest Peoples’
Programme) and Jerome Lewis, co-author,
(University College London) provided their
expertise throughout.5
Project members considered the monitoring of logging activities by local forest
people to be a key part of achieving better
forest governance in Cameroon.
Challenges
The project ran from 2008 to 2011. In the
second year, an independent evaluation
showed that the technology worked well.
But there was weak appropriation of the
project by participating communities.
Additionally there was an ethical
dilemma: data was collected and maps
produced, but since the communities had
not formally given their consent for sensitive data about potentially criminal activity
being shown to third parties, they could
not be used effectively for advocacy. A
second phase from June 2010 to September 2011 addressed these issues by
instituting a free, prior informed consent
(FPIC) process (Lewis et al., 2008) and
adapting community protocols (Bavikatte
and Jonas, 2009) to strengthen the political organisation and participation of
communities.
Despite its promotion in human rights
law, FPIC is rarely applied in practice.6 To
our knowledge, it had never been imple-
mented in industrial extraction, development or conservation activities in the
Congo Basin. Given the tradition of topdown development and government
interventions in this region, and the weak
participation and appropriation of projects by ILCs (Abega and Bigombe, 2005),
the project sought to develop a FPIC
approach to enable ILCs to control the
terms of their participation, strengthen
their capacity to negotiate with third
parties and engage in advocacy. The FPIC
process aimed to ensure that project activities and their potential consequences
were fully understood by the majority of
the community before monitoring activities began.
Process and methodology
The first step was to build effective partnerships within the project team. After
some early problems, this became a priority requiring ongoing attention. Learning
from and incorporating each other’s
perspectives in co-developing the methodology proved to be the most effective way
of addressing this challenge.
CBOs began by visiting a forest
community they thought might be interested in participating. After extended
community consultations, the CBO checks
that the information provided about the
potential positive and negative outcomes
of participating has been understood.
Consent is then asked for, and either
refused or given. If given, the community
works with the CBO to develop a community protocol – a statement of what
resources the community would commit,
when and on what terms, and a timetable
of activities to begin collecting accurate
geo-referenced data on their resources and
logging. The data is then used to make
maps, which can be presented to whoever
the community allows to view them. The
overall process is shown in Figure 1.
5 Lewis (2007) describes the participatory methodology used to develop the software.
6 For information on how to implement FPIC, see Lewis, this issue.