Sustainable forest management support project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Egis International and its training department, as part of an international consortium, provided technical assistance and training to the actors involved in the sustainable management of the DRC's forests (2011-2015). The project's objectives were broken down into four sections:

• building the capacities of the forest administration at the central level and of the three main forest provinces in terms of evaluating, monitoring and supervising the development process;
• incorporating, at the level of the forestry companies, the techniques allowing for the development on the Congolese forest area to be implemented;
• improving the regulatory framework, the methods and the instruments allowing for all of the actors involved (national and provincial public sector, private sector, civil society) to efficiently implement the development plans;
• all of the actors taking the main issues relating to the sustainable management of the forest regions into account.

The Forhom Institute, Egis International's training department (since 1 July 2014), was responsible for defining and implementing the training plan which is based on the following points:

• Definition of the "employment and skills" reference guides.
• Definition of the skills assessment reference guides.
• Evaluation of training needs.
• Drawing up of the training plan.
• Performance of the training activities.

This task covered all of the actors involved in the sustainable management of the forests: central administration, local administration and the private sector.

Egis International provided a long-term forest specialist and short-term expert teams who were responsible for preparing the training plan and providing training for the administration.

The training offered to the administration and to the forestry companies were divided into four main areas, in turn broken down into topics and then into training sessions:

• Elaboration of the development plan: development issues for the companies, GIS, sampling plan, development inventory, socio-economic studies, elaboration of the development plan.
• Implementation of the development plan: five-year management plan, annual forest operations plan, Reduced Impact Logging (RIL), worksite management, REDD.
• Cross-disciplinary expertise (for the company): social aspects, certification, occupational health and safety, management of the company.
• Cross-disciplinary expertise (for the administration): general management, project management, communication, IT.