For three years now, GIZ has been providing assistance to RIFFEAC as part of the “Establishing and strengthening capacities for sustainable exploitation of forest resources of the Congo basin” project: This aid has been geared towards three main objectives : modernizing education and forestry training curricula, developing a continuous training catalogue on key topics in the forest and environmental sector, and lastly fostering the formulation of a training policy for Central Africa’s forest and environmental sector.   

Main achievements of the last three years

♦ 2010: support provided for the development of a training policy that led to the formulation of sub regional guidelines on forestry and environmental training in Central Africa adopted by the 7th ordinary session of the Council of Ministers.   

♦ 2011: Improvement of training programs of RIFFEAC member institutions 

♦ 2012: Development of continuous training in RIFFEAC member institutions   

At the end of the planning workshop held on 20 March 2012 in Douala, the following activities were flagged for the year 2013:

♦ co-financing the implementation of the 6 training proposals selected

♦ technical workshop on project formulation and evaluation

♦ Continue assisting the 5 pilot schools in revising their curricula

♦ Formulating and raising awareness on sub regional guidelines in the area of forest and environmental training in Central Africa adopted by the 7th COMIFAC Ordinary Council of Ministers.

Prospects

Behind the scenes, preparation for the second phase of the partnership is underway, focusing on initial and ongoing training in the areas of forest, environmental and climate management in the Congo Basin. The RIFFEAC-GIZ partnership will continue henceforth under the aegis of COMIFAC. Support for RIFFEAC is expected take up a large share of the COMIFAC support project. Negotiations for the implementation of this new project are underway. It is against this background that GIZ experts are gathered in Yaounde to complete the project. In the same connection, Mr. Martin BAUMGART and Hubert THORTEN met with Soulemane I.SAMBO, the Regional Coordinator of RIFFEAC in the presence of Desiree NKWINKWA, Technical Advisor of the ITTO project and RIFFEAC communications officer on Friday, April 12, 2013 at the RIFFEAC Head Office. Another meeting with GIZ experts is scheduled to hold at the end of the mission. The appointment was set for April 22, 2013 to continue with the next stages of work.

For more information, please contact: Desire Nkinkwa <desirenkinkwa@yahoo.com>