Report

This lad is at Ngapa village in Tunduru District. He’s representing a Village Natural Resource Committee (VNRC), reading a report on activities to manage the forests belonging to the village. A major thing bringing income to remote villages such as this (we’d bounced along a rutted track for at least an hour) is ‘sustainable forest management’. We love jargon in our sector, and it often amounts to very little. Here though, through collective management the community has formed a body to attract investors to harvest timber from forest on village land, calculated to extract volumes that do not compromise the forest’s ability to regenerate. This can be done indefinitely as long as the extraction model is obeyed. In the last year the community here has generated around 20,000 dollars. The process is for the VNRC to report to the larger village assembly, for a collective decision on how benefits are to be applied. Communities often fund projects such as classroom renovations or construction of houses so that the government-appointed nurse will have somewhere comfortable to stay.