The Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) has published its 2025 Annual Report, presenting a year of results achieved with its six partner countries in protecting the Congo Basin’s forests and improving the livelihoods of the communities who depend on them. Approved by the CAFI Executive Board on 28th July, 2026, the report sets out the Initiative’s results, the risks and challenges it continues to navigate, and the lessons learned from a decade of country-led reform.
Scaling up Payments for Environmental Services
Central to this year’s report are Payments for Environmental Services (PES). PES are performance-based contracts through which farmers, cooperatives and communities receive direct financial incentives for agroforestry, reforestation, perennial crops, natural regeneration, sustainable forest management or conservation, once agreed environmental results are achieved and independently verified. Following the January 2025 interministerial conference in Kinshasa, CAFI’s six partner countries agreed on a roadmap for deploying PES at scale, backed by two digital tools developed for and with the sub-region: Ground Impact, for planning and modelling where PES can deliver the greatest climate and development returns, and the PES Management Tool, which manages the full PES cycle from enrolment to mobile payment. First payments were made in late 2025, breaking the ground for a scale up in 2026 and beyond. A South–South partnership with Costa Rica, a global pioneer in PES, was concluded in 2025, to exchange lessons learned across continents.
Spotlights from the field
The report also highlights particularly successful projects, and groundbreaking “first times”
Protecting communities and elephants in Gabon. With Gabon home to some 60% of the world’s remaining forest elephants, human-elephant conflict has become a growing threat to rural livelihoods. Through the CAFI-supported Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) project, mobile and electric fences were installed in a matter of months, already shielding thousands of farmers from crop raids while allowing elephant populations, the forest’s own “gardeners”, to be protected rather than seen as a threat. The project combines this immediate relief with longer-term solutions, including an innovative insurance mechanism for elephant-related damages.
First CAFI PES payments reach communities. In the Republic of Congo the Plateaux province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, individuals and communities received their first performance-based payments for validated results in agroforestry and perennial crops, worth close to USD 4,000, covering some 952 hectares. It is a concrete, tangible translation of PES 2.0 from framework to field reality, delivered through mobile payments directly to the households and communities who protect the forest.
A first independent, ISO-certified verification. For the first time, results underpinning a CAFI PES payment were independently verified by an ISO-certified body, combining on-the-ground checks with GIS-based satellite monitoring on a wood energy project in the Republic of Congo. This milestone strengthens the credibility, transparency and auditability of the entire performance-based payment chain, a critical assurance for donors, the Executive Board. the communities that will be paid for verified results.
Opening up national access. In 2025, CAFI took the significant step of opening direct access to the Fund to national NGOs for the first time, moving beyond its initial reliance on UN and international implementing partners. A new Regional Technical Assistance Facility, implemented by UNOPS, now helps national institutions and civil society organisations meet CAFI’s fiduciary, safeguards and monitoring standards. This broadens the base of implementing partners and strengthens national ownership of results on the ground.
Facing risks, challenges and lessons learned
The report also reflects candidly on the risks and challenges that come with scaling an ambitious, country-led agenda: sustaining the pace of reform through political and institutional transitions, ensuring monitoring and verification systems keep pace with a fast-growing PES portfolio, and managing safeguards and fiduciary risk as the network of implementing partners diversifies. Early PES pilots exposed practical constraints that directly informed the design of the more robust PES 2.0 framework and tools in use today.
The central lesson running through the year: durable forest protection depends as much on the credibility of monitoring, verification and payment systems as on the scale of finance mobilised. Independent, third-party verification, transparent digital tools and gradual, well-supported access for national actors are what allow performance-based finance to be trusted, and scaled.
CAFI thanks its partner countries, donors and implementing organisations for another year of shared progress toward protecting Central Africa’s forests and improving the lives of the people who depend on them.