The Clearing House Mechanism (CHM) workshop also brought participants from Belgium.

Countries of the Central African Region and Belgium, who began a five-day confab on biodiversity information exchange in the South West Regional capital, Buea on May 5, ended the brainstorming exercise on Friday at the Mountain Hotel.

Cameroon’s Minister of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development, Hele Pierre, opened the forum with a presentation of the rich biodiversity and ecosystems of Cameroon. The Minister stressed Cameroon’s determination to preserve biodiversity and thanked Belgium for its sponsorship.

Minister Hele Pierre briefed the stakeholders on the importance of the CHM which, he stressed, is indispensable in receiving, disseminating and sharing information concerning biodiversity. He hailed the CHM/Cameroon partnership as a concrete example of North- South cooperation and called on other countries to contribute to ensuring reliable information that concerns the rich biodiversity of Africa in general.

After Bonn 2009 when the information exchange system (Clearing House Mechanism) on biodiversity and the ecosystem cooperation knocked at the doors of Cameroon, the Ministry of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainable Development created a pilot committee in Cameroon with multiple actors working through a Technical Secretariat.

Since then Cameroon has participated to achieve the CHM goals of mobilizing resources to strengthen its capacity, identifying at national level viable sources of information to feed the CHM, using the CHM as a dialogue tool with the civil society on matters of the environment.

Cognizant of this partnership, in 2013, the CHM of Cameroon had a financial package for two micro-projects. In January 2014, Cameroon hosted a sub-regional workshop for the training of webmasters for the CHM websites. One month after, there was another training session in Yaounde for Cameroonians who took part in the January 2014 workshop. During the Buea forum the close to 40 participants exchanged information on biodiversity and the ecosystem of their respective countries.