Research
Research is the cornerstone of the centre’s activities, not least because we would like to furnish teachers and anyone passionate about the research activity with an ideal setting to carry out their works. The facilities to be established will be an asset to enable students and teachers/researchers to feed their spirit. Whoever would like to work and exploit our facilities, should address their inquiry to the centre’s management board, in which they will express the need to work with us and to use the available facilities.
Training and Education
The lack of adequate structures and assistance to junior researchers hinders the development of biodiversity studies. The first problem and the lack of specialists belong to the so-called taxonomic impediment. We want to counteract this trend on the African continent in general and in the DRC, in particular. To train means to provide a framework and experts who will be responsible for the supervision of students, new assistants. The switching to Bachelor, Master and Doctorate/PhD (BMD) system in the DRC justifies the need to increase or to create novel structures where the students and professors will practice the theoretical section of courses. This new educative system warrants and emphasises the need of using further practices during their teaching assignments so that after graduation, students will be well equipped with clear competencies in the field of interest. At the doctoral level, we intend to collaborate with foreign universities to consolidate the skills of our candidates.
Service to society
The DRC is blessed with several types of natural resources such as mineral resources (‘coltan’, ‘cassiterite’, ‘or’, ‘diamant’, ‘cobalt’, ‘cuivre’…; oil and energetic resources, ecosystemic resources etc. National and international companies are involved in their exploitation, including mining exploitation and projects related to infrastructure renovation. For this sake, environmental and social impact assessments are required before the execution of these projects. The CRBEC will be capable of assisting the government to achieve such activities. The centre is composed of a multidisciplinary specialists who will be able to supply expertise and upon which our activities will rely. The members currently available have a high level of research on plants, fungi and aquatic animals, and we will be recruiting experts in other taxa that we lack or, we can collaborate with other scientists available in the subregion.
We intend to assist the public sector in addressing different questions related to biodiversity management by providing policies needed to accomplish this in a collaboration scheme with the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development. Our expertise is relevant at both regional and international scales.