This guidance was jointly produced by the USFWS and FoS (under contract) in 2014.
Since 2006, on behalf of the American public and via Congressional legislation, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has invested approximately $3.5 million annually in grants supporting specific actions to conserve elephants, sea turtles and great apes in Central Africa. USFWS and its partners need to monitor the progress of increasing investments to the region to understand the degree to which desired results are achieved by USFWS grants programs and to learn, communicate and share evidence about what works, what does not work, and why. This monitoring will be greatly enhanced if all involved parties use similar monitoring indicators so that data can easily be aggregated and compared.
To this end, USFWS is proposing standard indicators for wildlife conservation in Central Africa to guide data collection by the USFWS, grantees, and other key partners working in the region. To develop these indicators, USFWS staff used a theory of change approach to link a specific action to expected intermediate results, threat reduction results, and the improvement of species and their habitats. Through this approach, USFWS staff identified key results and associated objectives, indicators, and monitoring questions. USFWS vetted these products, along with potential indicators and methods to assess longer-term threat reduction. This report shares these products and serves as draft guidelines for how to measure the effectiveness of commonly funded actions and how to assess the status of common threats across the region.
