Our work Projects Securing collective land tenure for local people of Bamuguba North, in South Kivu, eastern DRC

Securing collective land tenure for local people of Bamuguba North, in South Kivu, eastern DRC

Ongoing

From: 10/02/2024

To: 09/02/2029

Partners: Strong Roots

Stakeholders: 771,642 village members in the South Kivu province will directly benefit from the project.

Through this project, Strong Roots aims to establish a network of community-managed forests spanning 1 million hectares between Kahuzi-Biéga National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve in South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The project supports Indigenous Peoples and local communities to take charge of their forests through local community forest concessions (CFCLs) by demarcating and protecting 400,000 hectares – and area almost as big as Rhode Island – of pristine primary forests across nine CFCLs and collaborating with seven chiefdoms to develop comprehensive management plans for an additional 600,000 hectares within 25 existing CFCLs. This project also integrates traditional ecological knowledge and practices to protect biodiversity and enhance local livelihoods. The project is co-funded by the Rainforest Trust and Tenure Facility over three years, showcasing a collaborative effort for environmental sustainability and community empowerment in the country.

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Project Overview

Local communities and Indigenous Peoples in the South-Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo face significant land tenure challenges that threaten their livelihoods, culture, and forests. External pressures from mining, private land concessions, armed groups, and restrictive conservation policies threaten their traditional lands.

However, there is an opportunity to address these challenges under the National Strategy for Community Forestry, launched in 2014, by supporting local communities and Indigenous Peoples in obtaining legal titles to their ancestral land through the mapping and registration of their ancestral territories as Community Forest Concessions (CFCLs).

In light of this opportunity, Tenure Facility supports Strong Roots, to secure the collective tenure of the biodiversity-rich traditional lands held as non-protected forests by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in South Kivu. Strong Roots and Tenure Facility are also preserving cultural identities, valuing their traditional knowledge and practices to restore wildlife and landscapes for ecological integrity and biodiversity conservation by fostering primary forest connectivity across diverse ecosystems surrounding the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park.

To achieve these goals, Strong Roots will:

1. Train community members in Bamuguba Nord on how to effectively navigate the CFCL application process.

2. Advance land titling and demarcation for approximately 400,000 hectares to complete a 1 million-hectare corridor of forestland.

3. Draft and establish forest management plan that is gender-sensitive and rights-based for the corridor between Kahuzi-Biega National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve.

4. Conduct technical training to build communities’ capacity on processing and approving simplified management plans for CFCL.

5. Implement restoration efforts in degraded landscapes.