Side Event on 30 January 2006:
Needs and Options for ABS Implementation in Africa

The 4th meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) took place from 30 January to 3 February 2006, in Granada, Spain. This Working Group was convened to continue negotiations on an international regime on ABS, as mandated by the CBD Parties. It considered approaches to complement the Bonn Guidelines on ABS, including international certificate of origin/source/legal providence, measures to support compliance with prior informed consent (PIC) of the party providing genetic resources, and mutually agreed terms (MAT) on which access was granted. Difficult negotiations - some even called it merely an "exchange of views" - resulted in a heavily bracketed document, which could be the foundation to launch substantive negotiations on the various elements of an international regime for ABS, which ensures the fair and equitable sharing of benefits resulting form the commercial use of genetic resources.

In this context the side event was organized by DGIS and GTZ to review and discuss the recommendations of the Addis-Workshop. Of the altogether 450 delegates of the Granada meeting, around 60 participants attended the side-event, among them representatives from national governments, UN agencies, intergovernmental (such as IUCN) and non-governmental organisations, indigenous and local community groups as well as academia and industry. Given the fact of more than six parallel side events – the ABS-Africa side event fell on very productive ground.

The main emphasis was put on presenting and later on discussing the results and recommendations elaborated in Addis - see also  UNEP/CBD/WG-ABS/4/INF/9 - giving an overview about structures, mechanism, and problems identified in the different regions. The Side Event, which announced and presented for the first time the Capacity-Building Initiative by DGIS and GTZ was structured as follows:

• ABS Situation with focus on Africa
• Capacity-Building Requirements
• Goals of the Workshop in Addis Ababa
• Objectives of the Capacity-Building-Initiative

	loop.pdf	2.8 MB
	loop.ppt	8.4 MB

	Balcha_IBC.ppt Research and development of Teff in Ethiopia by Dr. Girma Balcha (Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, IBC)	621 kB
	Angwenyi_NEMA.ppt Kenyan Legislation on ABS by Anne Angwenyi (National Environment Management Authority, NEMA)	188 kB

Seyani_NHaBGM.ppt Presentation of results and recommendations of the Addis Ababa workshop by Prof. James Seyani, National Herbarium and Botanical Gardens (NHBG) of Malawi

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Moderated by Dr. Andreas Drews, GTZ

The discussion round generally gave a positive feedback on the Capacity-Building efforts undertaken. Specific issues raised were inter alia to broaden the initiative to a participation of West African countries, and to actively involve other partners such as industry. In this context shape and structure of further workshops and trainings of the Dutch-German ABS Capacity-Building Initiative for Africa were discussed. This discussion had a follow-up during the coordination meeting of the African Group on 2 February 2006, where the initiative was presented to all African delegates.

Additionally first interviews were held in order to get a more detailed feedback on the adoption and applicability of the elaborated Addis Ababa recommendations as well as an identification of country specific ABS capacity-building needs. Suggestions out of these talks were used for further surveys on this topic – questionnaires have been already sent to representatives of all African countries.

The outputs of the Addis-WS, the feedback from Granada as well as the results of the questionnaires will be presented and discussed at a side event at COP 8, to be held from 20-31 March 2006, in Curitiba, Brazil.

We are looking forward to a broad participation on this side event in Curitiba to conjointly with the African delegates further develop and shape elements of the Capacity-Building-Initiative. Invitations to the side event will be send out soon.