In a bid to protect 2.5 million hectares of endangered rainforest in the DRC, the foundation is working closely with local communities in the Inongo territory in the country’s west. It has trained 66 Congolese ‘master mappers’, who travel by canoe and motorbike to teach around 660 villagers – many of whom are hunter–gatherers or subsistence farmers – to use hand-held GPS devices to create a new digital map that will help with post-war planning and development in the region.

The project has already revealed 160 unmapped villages in Bandundu province. The Rainforest Foundation hopes to complete the digital maps in time for a government meeting to establish how vast tracts of the DRC’s forest are to be divided up and used.

‘It’s going to be the first time that anybody in the DRC sees on paper that these forest-dependent communities exist,’ said Cath Long, project director at the Rainforest Foundation.
‘The maps will be a vital tool for the communities to negotiate with the government. It will allow them to demonstrate that they are there, and that they need to be taken into account when decisions are made about the forest in which they live.’

July 2008