Rwanda National Forest Policy 2017.

The National Forest Policy 2017 is a cross-sectoral policy whose overall objective is to define government's medium to long-term intentions for the development and management of the country's forest and forest land. Forest and forest land resources will be managed to play an integral role in supporting Rwanda's goals for sustainable, green, low-carbon, climate resilient development to sustain and improve social security, liveble environments, economic prospects, and personal well-being of its present and future populations.
The policy seeks to make forestry more productive and sustainable by supporting and continuously strengthening the forest institutions to accomplish their mission. To this end, training-needs-assessments will be completed and training facilities will be established for forest technicians and workers. On the job training will also be provided. Legal revision of policies of related sections will be done to avoid overlapping or contradictory activities. Further, government's policy for economic development also includes encouraging and supporting the private sector to assume lead roles in forest sector development. A Public Private Sector Dialogue is in place to facilitate increased activity by private interests in the sector.
Further, the document aims to reduce rural poverty by supporting implementation of procedures that generate participation and decision making in forest planning and management by all relevant stakeholders to ensure proper benefit sharing from proposed forest development activities.
In order to enable more inclusive and efficient forestry systems appropriate agroforestry techniques and tree species will be implemented to contribute to increasing overall forest cover and enhancing agriculture land productivity. Further, applicable forest licensing, production and transformation practices and techniques to increase forest biomass fuel efficiency & decrease biomass fuel consumption will be applied.
Increasing the resilience of livelihoods to disasters is among the objectives of this strategy. Because degradation of forest watersheds and soils is overall at unacceptable levels special programmes and projects will be developed to rehabilitate degraded forests in the watersheds as well as lakeshore and riverbank forests. Raising public awareness about forests and trees importance for water supply will also be supported.
Regarding governance, the policy establishes that though MINIRENA and RNRA have the most direct immediate authority over forest resources, they carry out their mandate in a setting where other ministries also have targets somehow linked to Rwanda's forest sector. Amongst these are: MINIAGRI (RAB) regarding agroforestry issues; MININFRA regarding alternatives to forest fuelwood, land use planning, resettlement, urbanization, water and sanitation; MINICOM (RDB, ORTPN) regarding sustainable industrial development, cooperative development, tourism and wildlife conservation; IMNEDUC regarding promoting research; MINECOFIN integrating NRM and environment into sector planning towards effective EDPRS2 implementation.