There is no one-size-fits-all approach to deliver an agenda such as the SDGs which integrates social, environmental, and economic dimensions of development. Decision-makers have to develop methods to adapt this agenda to each context. In the DR Congo, WWF worked with the Ministry of Rural Development to design a tool for indigenous and local communities to monitor progress on SDGs implementation. The tool helps these communities collect data used to inform policy analysis at the provincial and national levels. On June 1 2018, the government officially adopted the monitoring tool as the main tool for tracking progress on SDGs implementation.

For a better integration of the SDGs into the five-year national planning 2017-2021, the Ministry of Planning, with the support of the United Nations System, conducted a process of contextualization and integration of the SDGs and targets in the national planning framework. This process has also enabled the Congolese Government to make an assessment of the implementation of the MDGs. From this assessment, DR Congo has learned lessons to capitalize on, including the context of implementation, planning, and monitoring. The need for a coherent programmatic monitoring and evaluation system was noticed. While it is clear that monitoring the implementation of the MDGs has been very difficult, it is clear that the SDGs will no doubt be even more difficult because of the complexity of this program and its broad thematic and sectoral scope. Monitoring the implementation of a complex program and multi-dimensional as the 2030 SDG agenda requires reliable and timely quality data. Considering also the fact that in the Democratic Republic of Congo the rural population, mostly poor and completely disconnected from decision-making process at the local level, represents approximately 80% of the total population, monitoring & evaluation system of the SDGs implementation, should be designed using the bottom-up approach. Hence the needs to set in place a mechanism to involve local community in implementation and in monitoring the SDGs progress. WWF DRC has worked with the Ministry of Rural Development to design a participatory community SDG monitoring tool for indigenous and local communities to monitor progress on SDGs implementation. The system is an easy-to-use tool, the 169 targets have been analyzed and the most relevant ones for local community have been selected and formulated under local indicators in a way local communities and IP could understand. For each indicator, a simple range of answer was developed to make easy the participatory consultation process providing answers that could then be summed up to a total that give a percentage toward the main capital assets of the community (natural, social, infrastructure, governance and human).
The application of this system under a harmonized set of local indicators for sustainable development has strong advantages. It is useful for the community to assess their own status or level against main objectives (or capital assets). It also helps to easily identify the gaps, facilitate the orientation of the priority activities, give the trends toward development and especially, allow local populations to be in the center of the process and participate fully in the implementation.

Indigenous and local communities, Government of Democratic Republic of the Congo, national Civil Society Organizations

The project started by the design phase. During this phase, experts from WWF-DRC and the Ministry of Rural Development and Planning have worked closely during months to design the SDG community monitoring tool based on the SDG agenda. Then, a national workshop has been organized where this tool has been presented to all the key Organizations and partners involved in SDG implementation in DR Congo. As a result of this workshop, DRC Government has approved this tool and recommended all the partners to use it as the main tool to track SDG implementation progress at the local level. In order to complete this process, it is important to set a national database to centralize data collected by local and indigenous communities.

The overall goal of this practice is to provide the DR Congo with a SDG community monitoring tool and a national coordination unit to implement this tool.

Result 1: By June 2019, WWF and DRC Government have signed a MoU in order to coordinate the Community SDGs monitoring process in the Rural and Suburban areas.

Result 2: By June 2019, a national network of partner organizations is installed under the supervision of WWF and the coordination of the Ministry of Rural Development to monitor the implementation of the SDGs throughout the DRC;

Result 3: By June 2019, a national multi-stakeholder coordination unit (Rural Development Ministry, WWF and NGO network) is created by the Minister of Rural Development to coordinate the SDG monitoring in rural area;

Result 4: By June 2019, a central data base is installed in the National Coordination Unit of the Ministry of Rural Development to record data collected in the field for use in the production of national development policies;

Result 5: By June 2019, WWF-DRC has published a scientific paper on SDG Community Monitoring Approach.

The most important enabling factor for this practice is the support from the DR Congo Government. This SDG community monitoring tool has been approved by the national Government. Currently, this is being used by the Ministry of Rural Development to track SDG progress at the local level.

From WWF-DRC experience, WWF-Cameroon is currently implementing a similar initiative.

We believe that this tool could be used in a way to strengthen local governance and become a catalyzer of peace, sustainable development and conservation in the DRC. The Project team is made of staff from the Ministry of Rural Development, the Congolese Observatory of Sustainable development and WWF. Local community and Indigenous people are at the center of this project. In the Maï-Ndombe, Tshuapa and Équateur provinces, 20 communities have been trained to use the tool to assess current SDG implementation progress in their villages. They have said that the insights captured by the SDGs monitoring tool provide them with a holistic view of development in their communities. This will support decision-makers to create interventions that contribute to protecting the environment, promoting quality of life for community members and enhancing economic growth.

WWF-International SDG Hub Stories: "INTEGRATION: THE PATHWAY FOR PEOPLE, PLANET AND PROSPERITY".