The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is working to promote management planning at the Lake Chad basin scale with several regional and global partners: the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) and its five member states, the Ramsar Convention secretariat (Ramsar Bureau), the Global Environment Facility (GEF, through the World Bank and UNDP), and NGOs including the Nigerian Conservation Foundation and IUCN–The World Conservation Union.
In this context, large-scale designations of new Ramsar Sites have been initiated since 1999. This has been achieved with support from WWF in all five Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) member states, as well as in two of the three countries which, although they share the Lake Chad hydrological basin, are not yet members of the Commission, namely Algeria and Sudan.
Improving the management and sustainable use of Lake Chad and its basin is the goal of a GEF project entitled ‘Reversal of Land and Water Degradation Trends in the Lake Chad Basin Ecosystem’. GEF program and LCBC have been jointly leading the development of this project. WWF’s role has been primarily that of a catalyst, bringing together governments, NGOs, and the Ramsar Bureau. This was partly enabled by provision of ‘seed money’ to support Ramsar Site designations.