DR Congo's CAFI-Backed Payments for Environmental Services — Independent Satellite Verification at Scale

The Democratic Republic of Congo holds the world's second-largest tropical forest and faces mounting deforestation pressure from smallholder agriculture and fuelwood demand. Since the mid-2010s, the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) — a multi-donor UN-hosted fund — has invested roughly $126 million across seven 'PIREDD' (Programmes Intégrés REDD+) projects in DRC, combining land-use planning, agroforestry and community forestry incentives at a landscape scale.

In 2024, CAFI and the DRC government moved to formalise this work into a structured national Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programme: a regional PES framework was finalised covering six eligible activities (including agroforestry, community forestry and natural regeneration), with standard contract, monitoring and verification templates shared across DRC, the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The same year, CAFI introduced independent, sample-based satellite verification of project-level results — from agroforestry plots to clean-cooking adoption — contracting SCS Global Services as a third-party verifier, with plans to automate checks through an AI/cloud-based remote-sensing platform. CAFI also launched a $100 million Private Sector Investment Facility in 2024 to extend PES-style financing beyond public programmes.

This is included as an emerging, honestly-labelled case rather than a mature one: the independent verification layer is brand new (2024) and has not yet accumulated a multi-year track record, and independent monitors (e.g. World Resources Institute's review of Congo Basin forest monitoring) have long flagged capacity gaps in the region's forest governance more broadly. What is verifiable now is the scale of investment, the existence of a standardised contract/verification framework, and the concrete step of engaging an independent, named third-party verifier rather than relying solely on self-reported government or project data.

Read the full analysis: https://mptf.undp.org/news/performance-based-financing-drc-cafis-next-phase-focuses-payments-environmental-services