Classroom doors are opening for the first time to children struggling to get an education in the rainforests of Cameroon. RFUK has launched a pioneering project to help ‘Pygmy’ children overcome the barriers they face when going to school.

As a carving knife dangles over the Congo rainforest, indigenous peoples are racing against time to protect their traditional lands from industrial-scale logging.

Forest peoples have for centuries safeguarded this Central African frontier – the second largest rainforest after the Amazon. Now they are producing maps to gain land rights so they can defend their territories against logging. With the maps, they are demonstrating what governments and the international community are ignoring –their presence on the land and the vital role they play in protecting rainforests.

The fragile rainforests of the Selva Central in Peru - one of the most ecologically diverse places on the planet – are under imminent threat from logging, oil and gas exploration, roads, invasions by settlers and illegal coca farms.

Seventy percent of the Peruvian Amazon – almost all of the forest outside national parks - is currently slated for oil exploration.

Greenpeace UK recently gave its full backing to the Rainforest Foundation’s long-running campaign to Stop the Carve-up of the Congo Rainforest.

I travelled to Akom II on a Wednesday morning. Akom II is a small village deep in the forests of Southern Cameroon. The town is not even one hundred kilometres from the ‘famous’ coastal resort of Kribi, with its sandy beaches and posh hotels. Whereas one can get to Kribi through a beautifully tarred road, the path to Akom II is rather tortuous. Several hours over bumpy roads and small bridges lead you through a staggeringly green landscape among small hills. The colours that dominate are green, endless variations of green and the reddish colour of the earth...

We have just begun an exciting new project in the Republic of Congo. We hope that the final result will be the first law in Central Africa that specifically recognises the rights of indigenous forest peoples - developed with the direct input of the people concerned themselves. Congolese human rights and indigenous peoples' groups will be spending eighteen months working with forest communities to draft this law, which we hope will be passed by the Congolese government in 2006.

The Ashaninka of the Tambo and Ene river valleys blockaded the roads leading to a major port in the Selva Central region of Peru last week. They were protesting at the massive delays of the Peruvian administration in granting the indigenous communities' land titles and at new roads being built through their lands.

Comic Relief has once again come to the aid of the Baka and other hunter-gatherer people of Cameroon, with support for the Foundation's projects.

Three new roads that were due to be built through the middle of Ashaninka traditional lands in Peru have successfully been stopped.

The Foundation will launch three important new projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo in early 2004.

Foundation's Peru partner, ACPC, wins prestigeous national conservation award.