In September, CTC co-organized a regional workshop to generate innovative ideas on how to strengthen and align the cross-cutting initiatives that target specific stakeholders in marine and coastal conservation to the development of the CTI-CFF Regional Plan of Action (RPOA) for 2020-2025.

The workshop was held on September 24-26, 2019 at the CTC Center for Marine Conservation in Sanur, Bali and was attended by 20 participants representing the CTI-CFF Regional Secretariat and National Coordinating Councils from Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. It was co-organized with the U.S. Department of the Interior-International Technical Assistance Program and USAID, and also included development partners from USAID Oceans Project and WWF.

The activity generated three five-year roadmaps for the CTI-CFF Women Leaders Forum, Local Government Network and Regional Business Forum, which build on and scale up initiatives in the last five years, and provide specific opportunities for integration into CTI-CFF activities from 2020-2025. These roadmaps will be presented at the next CTI-CFF Senior Officials Meeting in Honiara, Solomon Islands, in November 2019.

Over the past nine years, the CTI-CFF Women Leaders Forum was able to build the capacity of 200 women leaders across the Coral Triangle and empower them to have a stronger voice in marine and fisheries decision-making in their countries. The Maritime Local Government Network was able to bring in local government leaders to align their initiatives to the RPOA goals, while the Regional Business Forum has become a strong platform to engage businesses from the tourism industry to support the conservation and sustainability of the Coral Triangle’s marine resources.

“With this workshop, I feel energized and inspired and I see a lot of ideas and synergy that we can work together. We hope that we can keep the momentum going,” said Hugua, the chair of the Maritime Government Network.