Thanks to the continued support of the Nordic World Heritage Foundation and in collaboration with UNEP and IUCN, a meeting of key decisionmakers in natural World Heritage will take place in Nairobi, Kenya on 9-10 March 2006. Ten States Parties will be represented, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, the United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

This session aims to train national directors in the identification of new World Heritage properties and the revision of national Tentative Lists. Furthermore, there will be a focus on the process of site nomination and on the promotion of the World Heritage Convention.

The Action Plan for African World Heritage that was formulated as a result of the 2002 Periodic Reporting exercise highlighted a need for a multi-scaled approach in relation to World Heritage. The focus on the preparation of both national Tentative Lists and the nomination process in an international context will enable key issues of the Action Plan for Africa to be directly addressed: poverty alleviation through focused World Heritage strategies and training, transboundary nominations linked to international cooperation, awareness raising both nationally and internationally concerning heritage issues and the development of legal frameworks and strategies, etc.

This meeting comes as a support to previous meetings held in November-December 2005 as part of the first anglophone session of the Africa Nature programme, where nine national directors and fourteen site managers benefited from comprehensive training in natural World Heritage issues and skills.