In the wake of the Nagoya Conference in October 2010, at the end of December, the United Nations General Assembly gave the green light to the creation of IPBES, an intergovernmental scientific and political platform dedicated to improving knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

AFRibes intends to contribute to the development of an IPBES for Africa and, thanks to new information and communication technologies, to enable:

• better use of knowledge and information, by developing the spirit of collaboration, to build a distributed collective intelligence;
• the networking of existing skills;
• the promotion of South-South cooperation and the identification of areas where expertise needs to be strengthened

From 23 to 24 April 2012, the first workshop of the AFribes network was held in Tunis. This workshop brought together around 25 participants from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cameroon, Canada, Canada, France, Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, South Africa, Africa, Spain, South Africa, Spain, and Tunisia. A wide range of biodiversity stakeholders were represented including NGOs, research institutions, IOGs, local authorities and the private sector.

After two days of discussions on the needs and functionalities of such a network and its users and presentations of various cooperation tools, it was agreed that AFribes should continue its development as an interface that facilitates access for all to biodiversity knowledge. It was also agreed to continue to facilitate capacity building in the development of the platform by:

• The establishment of several projects at the request of AFribes users: some were already developed during the meeting (Niger, education and training);
• Strengthening links with existing initiatives on biodiversity in Africa (CBD, CHM, African Climate, the BIOMAC network...)
• Increasing the visibility and number of users of the platform: All participants agreed to be the ambassadors of Afribes and promote Afribes through their own networks
• The promotion of the use of cooperative tools to AFribes members through e-learning and e-training;
• Establishing links with IPBES, as well as with other organizations, was also discussed, but still needs to be discussed. A working group will be set up on this subject. A complete report of the workshop will soon be available on the AFribes website and on the SPIRAL website.