Sangha Trinational Trust Fund (FTNS) — Cross-Border Congo Basin Conservation Financing (Central African Republic)

The Sangha Tri-National (TNS) landscape spans 4.4 million hectares of contiguous rainforest across Cameroon's Lobéké National Park, the Central African Republic's Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas and the Republic of Congo's Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park — the first transboundary conservation landscape formally recognised in the Congo Basin, under a trilateral treaty the three governments signed in December 2000. In 2007 the three governments and donors including KfW, Agence Française de Développement, the EU, WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society established the Fondation pour le Tri-National de la Sangha (FTNS), an English-law conservation trust fund.

The FTNS endowment, seeded from 2010, provides long-term, non-earmarked financing for park management, a joint cross-border Anti-Poaching Brigade, and eco-development for the roughly 55,000 people (about 90% Bantu, 10% Indigenous) living in the landscape's periphery.

IUCN's World Heritage Outlook assessment reports the FTNS endowment at €67.5 million as of January 2020, and GEF reporting describes the fund's annual disbursement to the three protected areas as having grown from under €500,000 in 2016 to more than €1.5 million in 2020, around €1.8 million a year at recent levels. KfW conducted an independent ex-post evaluation of the fund in 2018.

Published capital figures for FTNS vary across assessment years and sources — the same IUCN dossier elsewhere cites a lower current capital figure of about €20 million — so the exact endowment size should be treated as approximate. As a conservation-financing trust fund rather than a direct-payment PES scheme, FTNS does not publish carbon-sequestration or water/soil outcome metrics; its most clearly evidenced impact is in biodiversity protection and institutional governance.