Covering 160 million hectares—68% of the country’s territory—the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo form one of the largest tropical forest landscapes on Earth. Together with the country’s vast peatlands, they play a critical role in regulating the global climate by storing immense amounts of carbon while supporting exceptional biodiversity. Yet in 2025 alone, the DRC lost 1.1 million hectares of natural forest, releasing the equivalent of 770 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions. For the millions of people living across these landscapes, forests are the foundation of food security, livelihoods and community resilience.
Forest loss is driven by intertwined economic, energy and governance challenges. Shifting slash-and-burn agriculture remains the leading cause of deforestation, compounded by extremely limited access to energy—only 10% of the population has access to electricity—fueling a heavy reliance on charcoal for cooking. Artisanal mining also contributes to forest loss, less through the direct footprint of mining itself than through the expansion of farmland and settlements around mining sites. These pressures are reinforced by insecure land governance: the absence of a legal framework that fully protects community land rights has enabled agricultural, logging and mining concessions to be granted on lands that local communities have occupied and managed for generations.
Women are at the heart of these landscapes. They make up 70.7% of the country’s agricultural workforce, cultivate the land, harvest forest resources and pass on the knowledge that sustains both their communities and the ecosystems they depend on. Yet this central role is not matched by decision-making power. In eastern DRC, only 13% of women hold exclusive land rights, compared with 36% of men, while customary land tenure systems grant women only 20% of exclusion rights over land. Whether Indigenous or from other local communities, women remain largely excluded from the spaces where decisions are made about the future of the territories they know best.
The evidence is clear: secure land rights strengthen forest conservation. Between 2015 and 2024, Local Community Forest Concessions (CFCLs)—where communities hold legally recognised rights over their forests—recorded lower rates of forest loss than conventional forest concessions. Strengthening community land rights, particularly for women, is therefore not only a matter of social justice—it is a practical and measurable strategy for protecting forests. But legal rights alone are not enough if people cannot exercise them. Language diversity, high rates of rural illiteracy, limited access to information and restrictive social norms continue to prevent many women from claiming their rights or shaping decisions. Ensuring that the women who already protect these forests also have the power to decide their future is essential to securing the long-term conservation of the DRC’s forests and peatlands.
CFLEDD works to put women at the heart of decisions about land, forests and natural resources. Across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it equips women leaders from civil society with the knowledge, skills and organisational support to influence environmental governance through training on gender equality, natural resource protection, leadership and organisational development. By strengthening women’s leadership, CFLEDD helps build governance systems that are more inclusive, more responsive to local realities and ultimately more effective at protecting the ecosystems of the Congo Basin.
Protecting forests begins with protecting rights. CFLEDD works to ensure women’s land rights are embedded in legislation from the earliest stages of lawmaking, guaranteeing women the same legal rights to land as men. This advocacy has contributed to the adoption of six provincial decrees in Équateur Province, securing nearly 200,000 hectares of forest land while introducing explicit legal protections for women’s rights to land and forests.
CFLEDD supports forest and peatland communities to better understand, secure and manage their territories, recognising community land rights as a cornerstone of long-term conservation. Through participatory land mapping, the identification of forests and other ecologically sensitive areas, and strengthened local capacity for natural resource management, communities are better equipped to protect the ecosystems they depend on. This work also contributed to the adoption of the six provincial decrees in Équateur Province, strengthening local governance while securing nearly 200,000 hectares of forest land.
Lasting conservation depends on inclusive governance. CFLEDD brings together local communities, public authorities and civil society organisations to develop clearer, fairer and more sustainable rules for managing land and forests.
In practice, this means:
For years, Chouchou Mpungu Losale has worked to strengthen land and natural resource governance across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her work is driven by a simple conviction: protecting forests and peatlands starts with how land is defined, governed and managed at the local level.
As Co-Founder and Coordinator of CFLEDD, she brings together communities, local authorities and public institutions to build more inclusive and sustainable systems of land and forest governance. Her approach recognises secure land rights and meaningful community participation as essential foundations for protecting the ecosystems of the Congo Basin—and for ensuring that the women who care for these landscapes also have a voice in shaping their future.
