The Samdhana's community preparedness program for REDD+ implementation provided support to Samdhana's partners in eight provinces of Sumatra for three years. Samdhana's support was designed to strengthen the partners' capacities in facilitating community managing and safeguarding community's forest.

The partners' hard work at community level faced challenges at policy level. The partners realized that community could not receive a definite time frame from the government in securing a community managed forest. Such condition is a result of budget policy within forestry sector whereby the government may not be able to perform verification process, because funds allocation for verification process is redirected to other program priority. Samdhana's partners belief that advocacy based on the government budget analysis should be conducted to ensure the government program meets community's needs.

Samdhana Institute responded the partners in Sumatra by entering a collaboration work with National Secretary of the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (SeknasFITRA) for a period of six months, September 2013 to February 2014. This collaboration is aimed at strengthening capacity of partners to conduct budget advocacy in the forestry sector through budget advocacy training. The training was divided into three stages - (1) Knowledge improvement, (2) Practical budget analysis, and (3) Coaching and mentoring.

The first stage adopted a combination of training and workshop whereby the participants were facilitated to discuss eight different subjects - (a) Strategic role of budget in forestry advocacy, (b) General budget principles, (c) Planning and budgeting framework, (d) Regional budget component and structure, (e) Budget politics, (f) Forestry sector analysis, (g) Forestry sector advocacy strategy, and (h) Advocacy action plan development. The second stage is practical activity where all partners conducted budget analysis of local government within their operational areas, and the third stage is dedicated to provision of technical assistance from SeknasFITRA to the all partners. Seventeen representatives from 16 Samdhana's partners in Sumatra, three FITRA Network (Simpul Jaringan) Coordinators in Sumatra, and one Samdhana's partner in West Nusa Tenggara participated in the training.

Samdhana's partners are now having better understanding on budget analysis techniques to assess quality of forestry policy in their operational areas. During the practical budget analysis all partners present their budget analysis results to Local People's Legislative and local government influencing the government forestry budget policy to support community securing the government permits faster. Based on the practical activities, the partners realize that clear strategic findings is another key success in influencing the government budget policy where they will discuss with SeknasFITRA during the third stage - coaching and mentoring.