In keeping with its international obligations , Liberia has ratified a number of Multilateral Environmental Agreements which jointly seek to bridge the gap between economic development and environmental conservation. The Government, through the various ministries and agencies, handles different aspects of the GEF focal areas activities. A review of the implementations of the various conventions and the national policies identified gaps, which the civil society organizations (CSOs) are kept in darkness. The main environmental issues identified are the continuous dwindling of the national forest cover; biodiversity degradation due to over exploitation of forest and wildlife resources; inconsistent and inadequate involvement of local communities and CSOs in forest management; prevalence of excessive droughts and floods due to climate variability; inadequate expertise at the local and locality levels to execute activities in the climate change and biodiversity conservation focal areas; unsustainable farming practices and increasing use of persistent organic pollutants chemicals in agricultural production and increasing pollution of the international waters.
The SGP has responded to these challenges by providing technical and financial support to local communities and CSOs in the GEF focal areas. The program has also been working to connect technical expertise from the government institutions (policy, practitioners, academic and research) to local communities and CSOs to address some of the environmental challenges. In this way, the capacities of the CSOs are being built and communities are being assisted to work towards achieving their developmental aspirations including improvement in their livelihoods while providing global environmental benefits.
For communities and civil society to be able to demand their rights to services (environment and natural resources) are met by the state agencies, they first have to gather baseline reference data on current service provision, which will also provide a benchmark for measuring progress so they can monitor and assess whether or not the situation is improving. They also need to find out what the problems and bottlenecks are that stifle progress in service provision so they know how and to whom they should target their advocacy activities when calling for their rights to services to be met. This information and the ability to undertake continuous monitoring of service provision and quality will serve as a basis for targeting CSOs/citizens? groups? advocacy activities, which will begin by focusing on the most underserved areas.

The main objective of this project is to build the capacities of civil society organizations (CSOs) to contribute to the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and national and sub-national policy, planning and legal frameworks and to gain knowledge in best innovative practices and systems for community landscape conservation, climate smart innovative agro-ecology, low-carbon energy access co-benefits, and soil, land and water management.
Specifically, the project seeks
? To build the capacity of civil society organizations working in the field of environment and natural resources to research, monitor and evaluate government progress on service provision.
? To strengthen the advocacy capacity and build strong partnerships of communities and civil society to establish ?CSO-Government Policy and Planning Dialogue Platform?.
? To enhance the capacity of existing CSO networks to engage government and demand accountability from service providers, development partners and local governments.
? To train CSOs as ?Barefoot Consultants? to access non-GEF funds such as with bilateral and in the ?direct access? modality of the Adaptation Fund and Green Climate Fund.