From September 18 to 20, 2023, ERAIFT took part in the regional forum co-organized in Kinshasa by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MEDD) and the Center for Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests (CAGDFT) with the support of Tenure Facility (TF) – forum on Nature Conservation and Land Rights of Local Communities (LC) and Indigenous Peoples (IP) in the Congo Basin. More than a hundred participants and delegates from various sub-regional structures (religious denominations, local communities and indigenous peoples, technical and financial partners, parliamentarians, universities and research institutions, sectoral administrations, customary power, civil society organizations, Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation or “ICCN”, NGOs and media) participated to this forum.

At the end of the incentive presentations on different themes (free prior consent or “CLIP”, participatory mapping, complaint mechanisms, etc.), supported by testimonies from CL/PA, exchanges and open discussions led by different panellists (from Gabon, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville , DRC, Sweden), a certain number of concrete recommendations were identified, namely: the urgency of securing customary land rights with a view to aligning with the global biodiversity framework of Kunming-Montreal and, the need of measures from the governments of the Congo Basin countries to promote a rights-based conservation model (and strategies) through the 30 x 30 roadmap for Nature conservation. The forum closed after a pooling of work in workshops which agreed on the need for an exchange framework (or task force) for (i) sharing successful experiences at the sub-region level, (ii) monitoring and advocacy for the legal protection of the rights of CL/IPs, and (iii) catalyze reflection on other mechanisms (for example community forestry and other effective conservation measures or “AMECs”) which directly empower CLs and PA in contributing to global biodiversity targets.

ERAIFT thanks its partners (EU and AGRINATURA) for providing the means to take part in this workshop, and the co-organizers (the MEDD, the CAGDFT and the TF) for having associated it with this unprecedented multi-stakeholder meeting on a sub-regional scale.