The project of 'Bridging restoration and multi-functionality in degraded forest landscape of Eastern Africa and Indian Ocean Islands' (FOREAIM) will provide tools and management strategies to enable restoration of degraded humid forest ecosystems by advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of forest degradation/restoration and their potential impacts on local populations, policy makers, governments and markets. We have chosen a novel, widely multidisciplinary, integrated research approach that couples biological/biophysical and socio-economic and policy generating variables, the results of which will form the basis for recommendations and guidelines for sustainable forest restoration and management. Our approach will put in place practical rules and recommendations to arrest degradation, restore tropical forests, create an enabling environment, ensure sustainability, create equitable opportunities to improve stakeholder livelihoods and encourage development by generating "high value" exportable natural commodities that are exclusively available from tropical forests. This start up meeting specified objectives and functioning of the project. My specific task was to lead the workshops concerning the team of workpackage 1, whose objectives are to assess stakeholders forest and tree management practices and uses. In this report, we deliver the Workpackagel global strategy.