Bonaventure Ebayi is a retired career bureaucrat and an international civil servant who worked for the Government of the Republic of Congo and later as the Director of Lusaka Agreement Task Force (LATF 2002-2018), He is known for innovating the law enforcement approach in Africa by bridging cooperation with scientific institutions around the world. Bonaventure established several types of collaborative initiatives between Lusaka Agreement Task Force (LATF) with Universities and UN agencies world-wide. In 2010, under his leadership, LATF established a collaboration with United Nations University to monitor transnational forest and wildlife crime using the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) model. WEMS-Africa became the first geo-spatial model in Africa to monitor wildlife and forest crime and operated exclusively by governments and scientifically supported by global research institutions.  He later invited researchers and scientists to work on the non-nominal data generated from WEMS and identify appropriate measures to address the challenges related to forest and wildlife crime. By the time of his retirement as the Director of Lusaka Agreement Task Force, he had established a strong collaboration with the United Nations University- Japan; University of Twente – Netherlands; Center for Conservation Biology of Washington University -Seattle; Sokoine University of Dar-es-Salaam, Strathmore Universities of Nairobi; Cape-town and KwaZulu Natal Universities of South Africa; in promoting science-based investigations and development of specialized tools for intelligence collection, surveillance and contraband specimens’ detection systems.

Under his leadership, Lusaka Agreement was awarded the CITES Secretary General’s Certificates of Commendation for its pivotal coordination role and great achievements during international operations code name COBRA I (2013) and COBRA II (2014).

Bonaventure holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Forest Protection and Ecology from the Voronezh State University of Forestry and Technologies in the Russian Federation. He has also participated in specialized law enforcement training courses organized by INTERPOL and UNODC on wildlife management and security, intelligence & investigations, intelligence lead enforcement operations and compliance, strategic operations planning, and counter-trafficking.