A truly international effort to conserve migratory waterbirds depends on exchange of relevant information, experiences and resources among a wide range of stakeholders. Yet information access and professional capacity remain patchy across many parts of the AEWA region.

The WOW Project contributes to overcoming these barriers by:

• Developing training & awareness raising programmes, and tailor-made training materials, for different stakeholders across the African-Eurasian region,
• Establishing exchange programmes and opportunities for job shadowing, thus enabling site practitioners to acquire hands-on experience in wetland management and waterbird conservation,
• Implementing and creating capacity for fl yway monitoring and data collection schemes, to address current gaps in geographical coverage and knowledge.

The following milestones have been reached to date:

• Regional Centres have been set up in Dakar (Senegal), Nairobi (Kenya), Amman (Jordan), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Moscow (Russia) to facilitate capacity development efforts within the sub-regions, and to refl ect the strong need for capacity development across the African-Eurasian region, and especially in Central Asia,
• A draft Training and Awareness framework has been developed and is being transformed into a series of modules that each WOW Regional Centre can adapt to its needs.