The Council of ministers is an organ governing the trans-boundary collaboration of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the promotion of wildlife conservation and tourism development of the Greater Virunga Landscape which is home to the endangered mountain gorilla.
Speaking to media after the meeting in Kigali on Thursday, Uganda’s Minister of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, Prof. Ephraim Kamuntu said the three countries have national parks which share borders and the parks are homes of a variety of wildlife that doesn’t recognise borders.
“Consequently, those are resources which our countries share; we need to protect and manage them effectively,” he said.
“The three partner states’ meeting intends to review what the secretariat has been doing, to give strategic direction of the secretariat, approve their budget and their programmes and then set the sustainable roadmap.”
Kamuntu said that they will have regular meetings to review the programmes.
The Chief Executive Officer of Rwanda Development Board, Clare Akamanzi, said that one of the most important outcomes of the meeting was the establishment of a governance framework in addition to the treaty’s provisions.
“We were able to review the performance of this institution (GVTC). We saw the needs and their budgeting; we were able to give them oversight and guidance,” she explained.
“We discussed how we are going to run it in the next two years, reviewed the institutional performance and devised ways for better performance.”
She said the collaboration helps the member states as Gorillas don’t know the borders while moving around Virunga.
“It doesn’t matter how they move from Rwanda, Uganda and DRC. They move around freely depending on what they need. One of the collaboration overseen by this framework is when a gorilla moves from one country to another; we have a revenue sharing mechanism,” said Akamanzi.
Citing an example of the impact of the collaboration, she said that a group of gorillas came from DRC six years ago and Rwanda returned $1.2 million to DRC between 2012 and 2017.
“This kind of revenue sharing practice is possible because we have an organisation like this which helps collaborating and monitoring daily how the gorillas are moving between our countries,” she added.
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