The concept of carbon credit is gradually establishing itself in the Congolese vocabulary in general and in that of the province of Mai-Ndombe in particular. This province resulting from the dismemberment of the former large province of Bandundu is the experimental territory for the sale of carbon credit in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
ERA-Congo SARL, a company registered under Congolese law whose capital is 90% owned by Wildlife Works Carbon LLC, a American company, occupies a concession of 299,640 hectares on the right bank of Lake Mai-Ndombe with the aim of fighting global warming through forest conservation, as part of the mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).
Understanding the carbon credit
In lay man’s language, the project consists of asking the indigenous populations to no longer touch the primary forest covering an area of nearly 300,000 hectares, once a source of life, with hope of obtaining gains from the sale of the tonnes of carbon dioxide captured by the trees in the ERA Congo concession
For Professor Jean-Robert Bwangoy, General Administrator of ERA-Congo SARL, selling this project to the population was not easy. Nevertheless, advances in marketing this “air” from the Mai-Ndombe Basin forest are beginning to bear fruit.
The true value of carbon credit
After an impromptu descent into the province of Mai-Ndombe, the editorial team of Hapamedia felt the reality on the ground and found that it is almost impossible to quantify the pecuniary value of the carbon credit in for the population because the true value of a ton of carbon is the realization of social and humanitarian works by ERA Congo with the from the gain obtained after sale of carbon credit.
We began our journey in N’selenge Village, capital of the territory of Inongo and populated by more than 4000 inhabitants, ERA Congo has illuminated the agglomeration by installing solar streetlights, a borehole under the management of the Local Development Committee, CLD. ERA Congo has also built a school institution of 6 classrooms and an administrative building of 3 offices which houses two primary schools, EP BAKELE with 299 students in the morning and EP MALAKO of 206 students who study after -midday. ERA Congo supports schooling by providing free uniforms and school supplies to schoolchildren in BAKELE and MALAKO. ERA also supports secondary schools final exams for all participants in the village.
N’SELENGE also benefits from a cassava field with improved stems by ERA Congo agronomists called Obama . The particularity of this variety is that it produces more or less 12 edible cassava tubers per stem for a record time of 6 months. All these achievements are possible thanks to the retrocession of the gains obtained after the sale of the carbon credit collected in Mai-Ndombe.
Similar achievements are visible in the villages of the southern part of the Inongo territory up to Lobeke , with the exception of Ibali Village where ERA Congo has built a modern medical center with 30 beds. Note that the Managing Director of ERA Congo, Jean-Robert Bwangoy claims to have more than 200 hospital beds to equip medical centers that will be built in different villages across the territory of Inongo in the Province of Mai-Ndombe.
