The project aim is to strengthen community capacities in Sustainable Forest Management and Biodiversity Conservation for rural livelihood improvement, through a participatory community approach The main strategies the project will explore are; opening space for the full participation of civil societies, NGOs working on natural resource governance, the local councils and their ward committees, so that they can contribute to the discussions and the implementation of the project. The reason for this is to generate cross sectoral mainstreaming of biodiversity concerns and options for the provision of increased technical support and advocacy. The project will also assign roles and responsibilities among community beneficiaries, set time frames and deadlines for completion of tasks and propose accountability strategy to ensure clarity of actions and result. Our strategies will be to; -Ensure quality engagements -Develop partnerships -Ensure effective learning and sharing -Develop organizations at community levels -Build technical and functional capacities of local communities -Develop monitoring and evaluation plans to monitor change -Develop community based forest management plans -Enterprise development to utilize community forest resources for the improvement of livelihoods.

The project constituents were involved in the planning and design phase of this project. The idea to undertake this project was from a community focus group discussion on exploring strategies to making forest resource useful for livelihood improvement for dependents from this resource. This community focus discussion was funded by FAO in 2011 and 2012, several trainings were held and the next step after the previous project was to provide indebt information on the vitality of biodiversity and how community can own and manage forest resource to substitute their livelihoods. The project has indicated several strategies to organize community engagements and do ground work on how communities con be useful sources of information on biodiversity and how they can utilize forest resources for their livelihood. Their presence is indicated in every activity event of the project, the project is community initiative, they own and will manage the process after the closure of the project. The monitoring and evaluation aspect of the project involves community stakeholders meetings, personal meetings, focus group discussions and consulting with key stakeholders to give feedback on impacts and these are the tools that will be use to monitor and evaluate the project, there is no way communities can be bypassed. That is why the final planning of activities and dates will be done in consultation with the communities.

The project?s approach to mainstreaming gender will emphasize on holding focus group discussions on specific thematic issues that will integrate participatory approach. The project will also pay keen attention to categories of women groups about their concerns and roles interms of making the project a success. Besides, in every community committee as well as beneficiary participants, women will be represented with a quota of 60%. This is to ensure that, crosscutting issues are treated equally and with seriousness and beneficiations are equitably distributed to both men and women folks