Paya de Marcken

Senior Director, Congo Basin, Forests

Trees in a congo rainforest
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Paya de Marcken, a senior director on the WWF-US Forest team, oversees and delivers technical direction and support for programs in Africa’s Congo Basin. In this capacity, she maintains strategic partnerships and donor relations critical to WWF’s efforts to preserve biodiversity and the services the basin provides to people locally—and across the globe.

Paya joined WWF-US in 2008 as the technical manager for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. In this role, she developed and advised WWF priority landscape programs in Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Rwanda. She also contributed to diverse national and regional initiatives in Central Africa.

From 2017–2022, Paya worked as an independent consultant, providing technical expertise and development assistance to biodiversity conservation, water management, and climate adaptation programs in West and Central Africa. She returned to WWF-US in 2022.

Paya grew up moving between countries in Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Zaire (now DRC), Madagascar, and Tunisia. She became fascinated with wildlife conservation from an early age, later pursuing a career in primatology with a focus on lemur ecology, beginning her studies at Duke University.

Between 2000 and 2002, she served in the Peace Corps as a parks and wildlife volunteer in Madagascar’s Analamazaotra-Mantadia National Park. There, she helped strengthen ecological monitoring of different taxonomic groups and build capacity for tourism. After her time in the home of the Indri indri, one of the largest living lemurs, she returned to the University of Maryland to obtain a Master of Science in Conservation Biology.

In 2006, Paya returned to DRC as the University of Maryland’s Department of Geography regional representative under the US Agency for International Development-funded Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE). Her responsibilities included applying geographic information systems and remote sensing to tropical forest management and directing OSFAC, a local nongovernmental organization established in partnership with the University of Kinshasa to collect forest cover and biodiversity data in Central Africa.

More on Paya

Title

Senior Director, Congo Basin

Education

  • Master of Science in Conservation Biology, University of Maryland
  • Bachelor of Arts in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University

Areas of Expertise

  • Congo Basin, particularly its vital forests
  • Biodiversity conservation, water management, and climate adaptation in West and Central Africa
  • Primatology
  • Lemur ecology
  • Geographic information systems and remote sensing in tropical forest management