President Paul Kagame on Monday received the “Future Policy Award” from the World Future Council during the first Inter-Parliamentary forum on “Forests for People” organised in Kigali. The award was handed over to the President by Alexandra Wandel, the organisation`s director. The award celebrates the world’s most exemplary national policies that create better living conditions for current and future generations, besides producing practical and tangible results.World Future Council is an international policy research organisation that provides decision makers with effective policy solutions. The event brought together 23 Parliamentarians, forestry policymakers and experts from countries in East and Central East Africa.World Future Council observed that Rwanda is on course to realise its goal to have 30 per cent of the total land area as forest.Wandel told The New Times that besides government’s commitment to increase forest cover, his organisation also recognised the introduction of the land tenure system.She explained that the choice of Rwanda as host was to enable other countries to learn from its policies and programmes.During the meeting, participants agreed to advocate and push their respective governments to ban the use of polyethylene bags. Rwanda banned the use of plastic and polythene bags in 2005.Countries represented include Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Zambia. “Despite what we have achieved in environmental protection, there is still a lot that needs to be done and one of the ways we can advance further is through coming together with other countries to collectively devise lasting solutions to these problems,” said the Minister of Natural Resources, Stanislas Kamanzi.
