Evaluation of management effectiveness of protected areas in the Volta Basin, Ghana: perspectives on the methodology for evaluation, protected area financing and community participation

Protected areas are widely recognized as an important strategy for biodiversity conservation. Most of the sites are, however, poorly managed as resource exploitation by fringe communities and low government funding, among other things, threaten their management effectiveness. We used the World Commission on Protected Areas framework for designing management effectiveness evaluation systems, with the Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas Management (RAPPAM) methodology as a tool, to evaluate six components of the management cycle at six sites in Ghana for their management effectiveness. We examined the robustness of RAPPAM as an evaluation tool in the African context. The results showed that most of the sites evaluated are vulnerable and exposed to various degrees of pressure and threats, including poverty in the nearby communities, adjacent land-use and encroachment. On RAPPAM, we noted that apart from inconsistencies in some of the assessment scores due to the biases associated with the self-assessment approach of the methodology, the management effectiveness framework places little emphasis on financing and community participation, though both play major roles in the management process. We proposed a modification of the framework within the African context, to address effectively the underlying courses of pressure and threats facing Ghana's protected areas.