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The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) states that local rural communities as main victims of dryland degradation should be the key beneficiaries, decision-makers and implementers of the countries’ National Action Programs (NAP), in particular at local level. In contrast, the Ethiopia and Mali assessments found that the NAP process has mainly taken place at the national level and that local communities are the stakeholder group that is least involved.

By combating desertification and dryland degradation, the UNCCD aims to ensure the long-term productivity of inhabited drylands and, consequently, ensuring the livelihood of millions of rural men and women and alleviating poverty. The Convention stresses the need for bottom-up planning and popular participation in the NAPs, and commits parties to ensure that local communities participate in the decisions on the NAPs’ design and implementation. The Convention also states that the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), with their experiences working at grass-root level, could play an important role. 

The two assessments in Ethiopia and Mali was an assignment for the Drylands Coordination Group (DCG), a Norwegian-supported NGO forum. The main purpose was to review the involvement of Civil Society (CS) in the UNCCD NAP in the two countries. In this context CS implies both community based organizations (CBOs) and NGOs. ¨

The main purposes of the two assessments in Ethiopia and Mali are to review the involvement of Civil Society in the UNCCD National Action Programs (NAP) in these two countries and to come up with recommendations for how to strengthen CS participation in implementing the NAPs.