countries                   Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) | < Sub-Saharan Africa See also: - Emergency Response to the Outbreak of the Cassava Mosaic Disease    Phase II - Reintegration, Conservation and Community Recovery Project (RE-COMMIT) - Agricultural Economic Grants - Developing Community Driven Value Chain for Agricultural Products - Commodity Chain Analysis for Coffee and Cacao - Rehabilitation of the Lokutu Oil Palm Plantation - Emergency Response to the Outbreak of the Cassava Mosaic Disease - Applied Agricultural Economics & Outreach Project II (RAV II) - Applied Agricultural Research and Outreach Project I SECID awarded a €1 million food security project funded by the EU SECID is diversifying sources of funding as it was awarded a €1 million ($1.3–1.4 million) by the EEU to implement a food security project in the Bandundu Province (see map). It involves intercropping of food and industrial crops. The program will utilize seeds for corn, rice, beans, peanuts, soybean and cowpea as well as cassava cuttings from resources generated by SECID’s USDA funded Food for Progress and USAID cassava I projects. As the program pursues production and post harvest activities with food crop, including marketing, it also expands actions to include industrial crops such as cacao, with emphasis on community driven small holder village level fields. The project will promote public private partnerships also involving civil society. Project sites are all either in or in the buffer zone for the Lac Tumba CARPE landscape (USAID Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment project). This EEU funded program is a very good example showing how various donors can work in synergy. Other news from SECID in DRC: In the last few months, after the very successful democratic election process, SECID finalized partnership agreements with the provincial governments in the Bandundu, Equateur and Orientale Provinces where we run our EEU food security, USAID GDA RECOMMIT and Cassava II programs, respectively. Such commitment by the highest level public sector official will undoubtedly provide significant level of comfort with economic operators involved in any public private partnership agreement that will derive from project implementation in those provinces. SECID has just initiated modest yet very promising activities with Jatropha for biofuel production in the Kasaï occidental province of DRC where we are working with private sector investors. In this project too, we have introduced the improved cassava varieties as well as other food crops to the local communities. It is a very integrated project where local communities and the private sector are working together in perfect harmony.