Efforts to tackle poaching continue to bear fruit. In October 2018, TK, one of the most wanted poachers in the framework of the Salonga National Park anti-poaching unit task, was captured by the brave park rangers and transferred to the Prosecutor’s of-fice of the Oshwe Peace Court in the Mai-Ndombe province, and put under provisional arrest warrant.

The DRC Ministry of Rural Development and the World Wild Fund for Nature in the DRC (WWF-DRC) signed on Monday, December 3, 2018, a Memorandum of understanding to promote the implementation of the Community Monitoring Tool for Sustainable De-velopment Goals (SDGs), in a ceremony hosted by the Secretariat-General for Rural Development in Kinshasa.

Through CAFEC programme funded by USAID, WWF has taken into consideration gender concern while implementing programmes and activities on the field and in policy instruments development for the 5 years the program has lasted. Five years after implementing CAFEC programme and acquisition of practical  experience on this thematic area, WWF would like to share,  through this report, its field knowledge on gender mainstreaming in the implementation of programmes and activities in the different landscapes.

As part of WWF-DRC's "Forest Governance" program with financial support from the Norwegian Cooperation Development Agency (NORAD), a mission of environmental civil society experts visited the province of Tshopo at the end of the year 2018. The mission welcomed the fact that it has contributed to guaranteeing social peace between rival communities of Tshopo, especially by facilitating the signing of the agreement between loggers and neighboring communities.

End of the year 2018, WWF-DRC Country Director, Mr Juan Seve, paid a visit to the PIREDD-Plateaux project, the headquarters of which is located in the territory of Mushie, in the Maï-Ndombe province. This field visit allowed to see the impacting re-sults of the project in the practice of sustainable agriculture, reforestation and lands conservation, but also in infrastructures development..  

Each protected area adapts to resource limitations in different ways. In the DRC’s Itombwe Nature Reserve, for example, WWF and ICCN have trained and set up com-munity-led patrols of the protected area to help make up for the insufficient number of    eco-guards. Community members collect and share raw data that is then upload-ed to the SMART platform by the eco-guards; they also talk with their neighbors about hunting regulations in and around the protected area. In the future, the community patrols will hopefully be equipped with the SMART technology themselves and thus have a bigger role in patrolling and monitoring.