Regional Centre for Development Cooperation (RCDC) started its journey in 1993 with the mandate to carve a definite niche in the development sector for empowering people for sustainable management of natural resources. RCDC works towards enabling the communities to manage their own natural resources efficiently and effectively for addressing poverty and improving the quality of life. RCDC has started working with the belief that proper management of natural resources can take care of most of the current development problems and the local communities are the best managers of these resources as they have the highest stake and time tested knowledge. Currently the organisation is working in areas of Policy and Action Research, Advocacy and Networking, and Field Demonstration Interventions relating to community based natural resource management and livelihood enhancement.

RCDC Support/Consulting Services Programme provides services to civil society organisations and development support organisations on training & capacity building, developing monitoring & evaluation systems, undertaking evaluation, impact assessment, documentation and research studies etc.

Over a period of decade and a half, RCDC has enhanced its institutional capacity to provide consulting services on different aspects of project planning and management, and also on customised thematic research. Earlier RCDC was not giving adequate emphasis on consulting services for various reasons. Now it has set up a consulting services unit with its main framework. The consulting services unit is also helping RCDC to plan its programmes and to ensure quality of the programme implementation.

RCDC has very recently created a separate unit to look after consulting services. Earlier the members and staff were taking up small consultancy assignments as per the requirement of the clients especially on action research and capacity building of local Government Organizations (GO) and NGO functionaries. It rendered services to overseas donors for preparation of prospective plan documents, monitoring and evaluation of NGO implemented development programmes. Also organised the capacity building programmes for donor representatives and conducted various research studies. In the process, RCDC gained the confidence of its clients for its quality product, intellectual output and sincerity. The learning’s of these small efforts and the present development needs slowly impulse to go for a full-fledged consultancy wing. Currently the Consulting Services of RCDC is involved in developing and executing monitoring and evaluation systems for the Agriculture Scale Up Project of OXFAM.

Different focus areas of RCDC-consultancy wing include bringing out/developing perspective plan for development support agencies, capacity building of Support Agencies, Local Government Officials and Development practitioners on natural resource management. RCDC figures prominently in the national and international network on community based forest management for sustainable use of forest resources, Market Access of NTFP and agri products and involved in several collaborative projects with research institutions like NIRD, IIFM, IFAD, FGLG, IIED and SQN in Austria. Domestically, RCDC is considered to be a think tank, deliberating holistically on the different aspects of Land, Water and Forest management. Some of the tasks undertaken by RCDC consulting services have been given below.