Evaluating social impacts using the SAPA tool involves setting up a multi-disciplinary facilitation team that brings together a diversity of players and skills to bring the process to a successful conclusion. This team had to be coordinated by an expert specializing in the SAPA method. Given the absence of a SAPA expert at local level, we turned to an expert at regional level. After contacting the SAPA expert, a local team was set up comprising six resource persons with diverse but complementary skills in protected area management. The local facilitation team benefited from several distance training sessions on the SAPA methodology to better understand the specificities of this assessment. The success of this stage in setting up the facilitation team was decisive in the assessment process and the quality of the results.
The existence of a manual describing the SAPA methodology was a great help to the local evaluation team who, in addition to the training sessions given by the experts, were able to use the manual to understand in detail the subtleties of each evaluation stage.
The availability of local skills adapted to SAPA evaluation and with a good grasp of the intervention context facilitated the evaluation.
This training course for local experts has shown us that the skills available locally are invaluable, and that it is possible to manage them successfully to achieve the desired results.