The 2025 annual conference was co-hosted with the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority (EWCA), the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The conference objectives were to promote collaboration and networking among project teams and facilitate the exchange of knowledge, challenges, and opportunities on key GWP-related themes of human-wildlife conflict and coexistence, wildlife-based economies, and illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade.

The conference opening set the agenda for a practical, solutions-focused week. Opening remarks were provided by H.E. Seleshi Girma (State Minister, Ministry of Tourism, Ethiopia), Fanuel Kebede (EWCA), Hannah Fairbank (GEF Secretariat), Charles Nyandiga (UNDP), and Juliana Victor (World Bank).

Over five days, the conference featured a dynamic mix of panel discussions, interactive breakout and workshop sessions, and a mid-week field visit to the canine unit at Bole International Airport. These provided project teams and partners with dedicated space to share experiences and challenges, exchange ideas, and provide inputs to future GWP knowledge exchange activities. Important threads of peer-to-peer exchange facilitated by the conference included the sharing of good practices and knowledge needs, presentation of what didn’t work and what was learned in the process, and discussion of how to strengthen the different partnerships needed for overall GWP success.

Good practices and practical tools were shared in the GWP Knowledge Marketplace, an engaging poster session that saw 29 projects share what’s working and where they need support. Through the marketplace discussions participants traded their knowledge with other project teams and searched for the knowledge they need on wildlife law enforcement, human–wildlife coexistence, behavior change, sustainable finance, and more. This was the conference’s most dynamic peer‑learning space and helped surface common knowledge needs across the GWP.

In the fail forward and adaptive management showcase, teams from 14 GWP countries shared what didn’t work and how they adapted in response. The presentations covered activities that didn’t go as planned, operational challenges, incorrect assumptions about stakeholder engagement, and technological failures. These were followed by engaging group discussions on how to improve adaptive management across the project cycle, identifying common adaptive management approaches for navigating challenges.

Multiple sessions allowed participants to discuss partnerships, from practical examples of how to operationalize transboundary collaboration, to a workshop session on building and sustaining collaborations with other countries, local communities, civil society, and the private sector. 

These sessions and more helped energize the GWP community and identified a range of opportunities for further knowledge exchange and collaboration. These will be progressed through ongoing project to project exchange and through further activities under the GWP knowledge platform.  

Visit the GWP website for more information.