In 2005 a partnership between MCP and Fauna & Flora International (FFI) was awarded a grant of £144,268 from the British government via the Darwin Initiative. The grant, which covered 3 years, allowed MCP to accelerate work with the communities as it was no longer dependent on national PFM funds being channelled through Kilwa District Council which were subject to administrative bottle¬necks. MCP’s work in this time was focused on 4 pilot villages in central Kilwa. By the end of the grant period two of these villages, Kikole and Kisangi, had approved management plans and were implementing them, with the approval for the other two villages’ forests imminent. Kikole had also earned the first revenue from a community forest in Kilwa, when an oil prospecting company agreed to compensate the village for trees felled on a seismic line survey which ran through their Village Land Forest Reserve (VLFR).
MCP invested significant resources from this grant in developing an innovative approach to Participatory Forest Resources Assessment (PFRA). Standard PFRA techniques were found to yield data on timber stocks that were too poor quality for accurate determination of logging quotas, whilst also devoting significant effort to assessing forest resources, such as firewood, that did not need active management in Kilwa. MCP devised an alternative Participatory Timber Inventory technique that uses rapid transects to collect data only on selected timber species, and then allows communities to calculate their own timber quota, without reference to technical experts or computer facilities.
During this period, and with additional support from various small grants, MCP instituted 3 complementary monitoring programmes in its pilot villages. The first tracks forest structure, using basal area as a proxy for forest health, inside and outside VLFRs, as a means to show the effects over time of active community management of the forest. The second monitors socio-economic factors at the household level, and will provide a baseline against which to measure the impact on livelihoods of projected revenue from PFM. Both of these monitoring programmes will show results only in the long term, so in the shorter term MCP has implemented the Most Significant Change monitoring system which provides a framework for collating feedback from community stakeholders on important qualitative changes taking place as a result of the project. This has shown steadily increasing awareness and significant attitude changes within the pilot communities.
Additional technical expertise came from FFI through their Communities, Livelihoods & Governance team.
| What is mpingo? | Where does it grow? | What we do | Reports | Certificate | About us | Links |