Kinshasa, August 17th,2026 (CPA).– Officials and senior staff at the Ministry of Land Affairs were called upon by the minister responsible to ensure the security of land records at the close of the training course for these officials, held on Monday in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ‘You are now key players in safeguarding the State’s land records. I therefore ask you to demonstrate rigour, discipline, confidentiality and integrity in safeguarding and handling the documents entrusted to you, for behind every land file lies a right to be protected, a citizen to be safeguarded, and a decision by the State of which we must preserve a record,” has said O’Neige N’sele, Minister in charge of Land Affairs. “The training course we are concluding today was not an isolated event; it represents an important step in the implementation of the ministerial decree of June 25th establishing the Commission to Support Land Reform in the field of archives. Through this decree, we sought to provide a concrete response to the challenges relating to the preservation, classification, security, traceability and digitisation of our archives,” she has added.
To this end, Ms N’sele explained that this training had equipped 250 staff and managers from seven land registration districts in Kinshasa, namely: Gombe, Limete, Mont-Ngafula, Maluku, N’sele, Kinshasa and Ngaliema, on key topics including the classification, cataloguing and indexing of documents, archive management tools, preventive conservation, and rules governing access and confidentiality.The training also covered preparation for digitisation, as well as the principles of digital archiving. ‘You now have a handbook on land registration archiving, which is set to become a practical reference tool in the day-to-day performance of your duties. The true success of this training will not be measured by the number of certificates or cards we are awarding today; it will be evident when the movement of documents is properly tracked, and when the risks of loss, substitution, falsification or deterioration of the archives are significantly reduced,” has emphasised Minister N’sele.
For his part, Aimé Kasongo, Director-General of the National Archives Institute of the Congo (Inaco), a partner in this training session, announced that follow-up sessions would soon be organised to assess the effective implementation of these concepts. This training constitutes the first phase of the skills-building process as part of the modernisation of land administration.