Around 30 participants from India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal and Viet Nam have participated in the training to strengthen their entrepreneurial confidence, risk management, technical and financial management skills.

"This training is a great opportunity for the participants from all five Asian countries to learn mitigating the risk of their business.", said Dr Sindhu Prasad Dhungana, Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Forests and Environment (MoFE), highlighting the importance of the regional training to empower the FFPOs in enterprise development.

“FFF phase II continues to support FFPOs to achieve climate resilient landscapes and improved livelihoods. Specifically, this regional training is addressing FFF’s outcome 2 on increased entrepreneurship, access to markets and finance, but also touches upon outcomes 1, 3 and 4, on enabling policies and internal governance, climate resilience and improved access to social and cultural services, respectively.”, said FFF Coach Sophie Grouwels, FAO Forestry Officer.

Two toolkits were introduced to support practitioners in improving risk management and business incubation processes. The Securing the Future risk management toolkit provides a framework and set of tools designed to guide the process of identifying and assessing possible business risks, while the Forest business incubation toolkit (ForBInc) provides a framework for planning the development of business incubation services.

The training-of-trainers also included an introductory refresher module on market analysis and development approach, used within the FFF programme to support FFPO’s in establishing members’ enterprises. Dr Prahlad Thapa, Country Representative of IUCN Nepal emphasised the need to support the entrepreneurs in developing their own business plans using the shared tools and concepts. Bharati Pathak, Chairperson of Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN) highlighted that FFF is providing a good opportunity for producer groups to securing their rights and accounting their contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) programme provides direct financial support and technical assistance to strengthen forest and farm producer organisations representing smallholders, rural women’s groups, local communities and indigenous peoples’ institutions. Collectively, forest and farm producers have the potential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and to respond to climate change at landscape scales. A partnership between Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), IUCN and Agricord, FFF is funded by the European Union through the FAO-EU FLEGT programme, Finland, Germany, IKEA, Sweden and The Netherlands.