14 March 2018 Participants at the International Conference on Forestry Training: Addressing the Challenges of Training for Sustainably Managing the Congo Basin Forests, which ended on 7 March 2018, have called on ITTO and the international community to provide ongoing technical and financial support to improve facilities, equipment, materials, training and capacity building for forestry training in the Congo Basin subregion.

Among other things, participants adopted new training modules on sustainable forest management, one targeted at university students and the other directed at field technicians in forestry. The conference called for support for the uptake of the training modules by all training institutions in the subregion.

In his closing remarks, ITTO Executive Director Gerhard Dieterle acknowledged the need for support to further advance training capacity in the subregion. He called on participants to think strategically on the future role of training and research for solving the following major issues, among others: the need to sustainably produce more timber for a growing population; addressing deforestation and forest degradation from inside and outside the forest; creating sustainable timber supply chains for domestic and international markets; alleviating poverty—considering the needs of rural populations for producing food and using wood for energy; landscape management; benefit-sharing; and creating an enabling environment for further investment in the forest sector.

The conference, which was held in Douala, Cameroon, was attended by more than 180 participants from universities, training institutions, government, civil society and regional organizations in Benin, Burundi, Canada, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and Rwanda.

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