Mpingo Conservation Project : Celebrating 10 years of Mpingo Conservation

In November 1995 a group of students came together at Cambridge University in the UK, and resolved to organise an expedition to southern Tanzania to carry out urgently required field investigations into the ecology and exploitation of the threatened tree, Dalbergia melanoxylon. They called their expedition Tanzanian Mpingo 96 after the Swahili name for the tree. That expedition subsequently grew into the award-winning project we are now. Thus in November 2005 the Mpingo Conservation Project was ten years old.

In those past ten years the project has:

Organised 6 research expeditions to Tanzania.
Surveyed over 1400 mpingo trees, by far the largest data set available on the species.
Investigated local use and attitudes towards the tree.
Reported on the market dynamics of mpingo carvings.
Established a field office at Kilwa in southern Tanzania.
Initiated community management of mpingo and other high-value timber trees in Kilwa District.
Conducted a timber stocks assessment across the entire 13,000km² of Kilwa District.
Set up a baseline for a long term monitoring programme of mpingo growth rates.
Developed an education programme to raise awareness of the value of mpingo amongst local people in southern Tanzania.

To celebrate all these and other successes, the project organised an anniversary dinner on 26th November 2005 back at the birthplace of the project, Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The evening was hosted by Stephanie Hughes of BBC Radio 3, and featured oboe trio recitals by Nick Daniel, Holly Fawcett and Tom Barber, as well as slide-show presentations about the project's work by some project staff. Many thanks to all who helped with the evening which was a great success.