Month: October 2021

The first field research mission starts this Sunday 24 October!

Why? Remember, with the help of the Development Research Fund of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, we want to understand the indirect effects of our project on village communities. Because, although our project is full of good intentions and was enthusiastically received last spring, it is possible that our action has consequences that are not always desirable, and perhaps also unsuspected positive effects. We want to understand this so that we can act even more effectively and sustainably.

ForDev, the ETH institute for sustainable tropical forest management, is most familiar with this issue of human-nature interaction and will be conducting the study.

Before observing the impact of arboRise on people, we want to understand how people interact with trees and forests. This is the purpose of this first research mission, which will be followed by two other field missions.

This first mission is therefore about understanding the context of the Linko sub-prefecture and, in particular, the question of ‘what pushes a villager to cut or not to cut his trees‘. This is what Léa Ackerer, a specialist in sustainable development, will be observing over the next two weeks, in total immersion in two villages near Linko. Léa knows Guinea well as she has already conducted impact studies there for Biotope, an ecological consultancy company.

As this issue is independent of arboRise’s activities, Léa will stay in the villages of Forono and Kissidou (2 x one week), where no reforestation activities have yet taken place. In order to understand the context and the relationship between the population and the forest, it will be necessary to understand the issues of everyday life, the constraints, the culture, the social roles, etc. by meeting many people. In each village Léa will conduct semi-structured interviews with the village chief, 2 heads of family, 2 wives, the chief of the hunters, the village elder and the village youth. Since she will be staying with the local people with her interpreter, she will also get a lot of spontaneous information during these two weeks.

The journey from Europe went very well and the welcome in Forono was sensational:

The Fedevaco selects arboRise and invites us to submit a development project for the Diaspora Award. This training programme is aimed at associations and social and solidarity-based enterprises run by diasporas established in the canton of Vaud. Three prizes will be awarded to the winning projects: the first prize winner will receive CHF 10,000, and the second and third prize winners will receive a promotional video of their project.

For arboRise, this is an opportunity to strengthen our skills and to develop a cooperation project that complements our reforestation action, by benefiting from the expert advice of Fedevaco (remember that this umbrella organisation of 49 associations active in development cooperation has been putting its expertise and know-how at the service of public authorities in the Canton of Vaud for over 30 years).

What is our project?

In the context of our reforestation activities, we note that traditional knowledge related to trees has been lost, whereas a few generations ago, communities maintained real agro-forests. Fortunately, not everything has been forgotten and our intention is to revalorise local silvicultural knowledge.

On the one hand, we want to use the skills of recognised national Guinean institutions. The ENATEF in Mamou, for example, trains around 30 young forestry professionals each year. On the other hand, we want to engage older women who have traditional knowledge. They are the ones who know the old recipes, who know how to prepare traditional remedies, who remember the ancient wisdom linked to the trees and their products. We want to organise a dialogue between several of these elders in the presence of the young women farmers, so that the diversity of memories can be expressed and so that this moment can be a memorable collective learning experience.

The aim is therefore to enhance the local intangible heritage related to trees and to contribute to agricultural outreach in the community.

Of course, our initial intention will evolve. This is precisely the aim of our participation in the Diaspora Award: to enrich and improve our initial idea to ensure a sustainable impact.

Ever heard of Restor? … a great initiative of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich to connect local reforestation initiatives 🌱 with global scientific databases on trees 🌳🌲🌴, climate 🌡️, satellite data 🛰️, and more.

In one year, these scientists managed to interest more than 70’000 restoration sites worldwide 🌍 and bring them together on one platform 🥇. 200 project holders, the big ones and the small ones, are gathered there and publish according to the same logic data about their area, their perimeter, the type of restoration, etc.

This makes these projects comparable. Identifying best practices to learn from each other will be the next step. But not only that: thanks to Restor’s scientific knowledge, it will soon be possible to understand why some projects perform better than others and how to optimise this huge collective effort.

Great work! We are proud to be part of it with arboRise! Because we too have made it our mission to share our experiences so that others can be inspired by our approach.
Have a look: https://restor.eco/map

The “making of” film summarises in 7 minutes 100 days of work in the field. It is available today on our social networks. This summary of our activities has two objectives:

1. to make our action known in images to convince new people to support us
2. to explain our approach so that others can be inspired by it. Indeed, it is one of the statutory aims of our association to disseminate our methods and to experiment with new ones

This film is not “professional”. Indeed, we prefer to invest our resources in planting trees than in marketing.