Participatory monitoring in the Republic of the Congo with ExCiteS
In the 2010s, a UCL ExCiteS (Extreme Citizen Science ) team worked with local communities in remote forest locations in the Republic of the Congo to assist with participatory monitoring of forest management . The UCL team iteratively designed and developed a smartphone mapping application with the local community.
While timber is an important income source in Congo (second only to oil), local communities tend to see very little benefit from the logging activities that take place in their forest lands.
The 2003 EU FLEGT (Forest Law Enforcement , Governance and Trade) law in the Congo granted new rights to local communities and created requirements for logging companies to respect local resources. International NGO Forest Monitor and their local watchdog invited UCL ExCiteS to design a mapping application to help communities on the ground hold logging companies to account for this law.
The application enables communities to document illegal logging , map the locations of vital resources, and communicate the information to IM-FLEG. It uses pictorial decision trees as a way of bridging language and literacy divides. The application was designed for Android smartphones and does not rely on third party systems. Community recommendations to improve usability were documented by the ExCiteS team during fieldwork and incorporated into the application.
It is hoped that through participatory monitoring, communities can hold logging companies accountable.
Screenshot from ExCiteS blog picturing two participants using the mobile data collector