In 2015, Cameroon was one of the first developing countries to submit a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The document sets out 148 adaptation actions in 20 projects covering 12 priority sectors. After 7 years of the NAP’s implementation, an evaluation was conducted by the Global Water Partnership to identify challenges, collect lessons learned, and provide recommendations on how to make the NAP implementation more gender responsive and more effective overall. One of those key recommendations was the need to establish a strong Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) system to be integrated into the forthcoming updated version of the NAP document.
Now, with technical and financial assistance from the NAP Global Network’s Country Support Hub, the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection, and Sustainable Development is leading the development process for a MEL system to track adaptation progress in the country and to improve decision making through a continuous process of evaluating and learning. In order to kick off this process, an inception workshop was held in Mbalmayo from October 24 to 26, 2022. It brought together government actors engaged in the NAP process as well as stakeholders from non-governmental organizations and local communities.
The inception workshop aimed to update attendees on the status of the NAP process, introduce a plan to elaborate the MEL system, and build capacities for its development. The participants learned about existing MEL systems already in place in the country—such as those of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Agriculture—assessed their approach to data management and discussed how they could be linked to the future NAP MEL system.
Participants also exchanged ideas about the characteristics the MEL system would need, including searchable information and data on past and ongoing adaptation projects and robust quantitative and qualitative indicators, particularly for the agriculture, livestock, water resources, forestry, and mining sectors. Proposals were also brought forward for an institutional framework for the MEL system and for the integration of gender considerations.
As a next step for developing Cameroon’s adaptation MEL system, the workshop’s outcomes will be prepared based on the interviews conducted with the participants, the data collected, and the contributions from sectoral and municipal stakeholders. The Cameroon NAP team will also define an institutional framework, roles and responsibilities, a process for reviewing and revising indicators (including with gender considerations), a data collection and evaluation system, and the capacity-building needs.
To learn more about our work on MEL in national adaptation, visit our theme page.