Democratic Republic of the Congo

VLIR-UOS revised its country approach towards an ‘Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development’ centred approach. Moreover, VLIR-UOS wants to facilitate connections between different actors and projects present in a given country. With these objectives in mind, the Country Reference Framework (CRF) for DR Congo supports teams of academics when identifying and formulating project proposals, by providing a context analysis focused on Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development and the higher education sector in DRC, and by providing an overview of Belgian development actors active in DRC, their ongoing projects and partners, in view of exploration of opportunities for synergy and complementarity. Belgian Non-Governmental Actors involved in the geographic Joint Strategic Framework (JSF) DRC, those involved in the thematic JSF on Higher Education and Science for Sustainable Development, those involved in other thematic JSFs as well as Enabel have been included.

VLIR-UOS cooperation in DR Congo has been aligned with the DRC development plans in terms of national poverty reduction and higher education and has mainly focused on 2 central themes ( Connectivity, opening up towards the world ('désenclavement') ; Staff renewal and training of young academics ('relève académique') via which topics of top priority for the Congolese higher education sector such as Quality Assurance, Academic English and D4D have been dealt with by transversal projects and institutional university cooperation projects. Next to this numerous short and medium term projects were undertaken in the spheres of natural resources and biodiversity, food security, public health and social development.