In the past few weeks, a new wind is blowing for protected and conserved areas management effectiveness in the islands of the Western Indian Ocean. 

Marine Protected Area Managers discover IMET 

Thanks to a collaboration between Varuna Biodiversité, RECOS, the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC), Western Indian Ocean Marine Protected Areas Professional Network (WIOPAN) of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) and with the support of BIOPAMA, 40 participants were introduced to IMET on 29th- 30thMarch in Nosy Be island, Madagascar. Participants were from MPAs, government agencies, NGOs, biodiversity funds and support agencies from 7 countries and territories: Comoros, Réunion, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Rodrigues and Seychelles. IMET coaches Domoina Rakotobe, Tiana Rahagalala and Arthur Tuda actively led the training which ended with strong interest in the tool. The next steps would be to use IMET in their own institution, and to organize a session on management effectiveness at the first MPA managers network congress scheduled in October.

Madagascar National Parks starts the largest IMET campaign

After having one of their staff trained as an IMET coach in 2022, Madagascar National Parks has launched an ambitious campaign to assess all of its 43 protected areas with IMET this year. The first step, an IMET workshop, was held April 17-21 on the island of Nosy Be, with participation of eight protected areas in northern Madagascar. The particularity of the approach was to combine training and IMET pre-filling. For this first event, Madagascar coaches Liliane Parany (MNP) and Tiana Rahagalala (URI) were supported by COWI’s experts Carlo Paolini and Domoina Rakotobe. Trainee coaches from MNP and the Ministry of Environment were also part of the training team. MNP hopes to produce an IMET scaling-up analysis of its protected areas in the second semester of 2023

IMET version for OECM is tested in two community-based conservation areas in Madagascar

In addition to a test in Sierra Leone in March, a new field test of the OECM version of IMET was conducted in a terrestrial and a marine conservation area in northeastern Madagascar. This new version of IMET aims to facilitate management effectiveness evaluations for sites other than protected areas, particularly community conserved areas. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Madagascar Program supported the initiative, namely through their EU-funded project Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM). From April 12-16 , 17 participants from the Ambodivoangy Miray community near Makira National Park and 19 participants from Maintimbato LMMA in Antongil Bay evaluated the effectiveness of their site management. Participants reported that IMET helped them better understand strengths and weaknesses of their management, and identify clear recommendations.