Month: July 2024

One of the aims of the Cooperative, and the main role of the Cooperative Committee, is to draw up a key for distributing the carbon revenues. It is certainly not up to arboRise to define how this income will be shared among the cooperative members. This choice must be made by those primarily concerned, in accordance with local traditions and customs.

But what will these criteria be? And how will they be weighted? Should effort and merit be taken into account, or should income be distributed uniformly? Can fate be invoked to justify certain disappointing results? etc.

Rather than discuss these criteria in the abstract, we opted for serious games, which are more effective. In practical terms, we used pre-printed tarpaulins with a number of scenarios on them, as in this case, where the aim was to distribute income according to the hazards suffered by the landowners:

Each member of the cooperative committee was given 20 (symbolic) coins representing the project’s carbon revenues and was tasked with dividing them between the 10 situations presented on the tarpaulin, then commenting on his or her choice in front of his or her peers.

 

As the day progressed, a consensus quickly emerged on the principles for distributing carbon income, for example:

• Compliance with the cooperative’s rules by each member should be rewarded in proportion to the effort required to comply with each rule. For example, certain ‘costly’ rules (such as the installation of firewalls around the pitches) should be better rewarded than simple rules (such as the installation of tape to mark the pitches).
• Of course, those who do a great deal to encourage the growth of trees on their plots should be rewarded, but the ‘undeserving’ should also be given a little, otherwise they risk leaving the project.
• The reward should (very clearly) be for the result (the density and height of the trees on the land) and not for the effort required to achieve this result.
• External factors (infertility of the land, fires, etc.) should not be regarded as inevitable: it is the responsibility of the landowning family if it has chosen an unfavourable plot of land or if its land has been affected by fires.

Over the following days, we repeated the same exercise in the 26 villages, 2 villages a day, with all the land families in the village and in the presence of the 2 members of the village cooperative committee. The idea was to show the farmer-families the complexity of the Cooperative Committee’s task, and it also made it possible to express out loud what everyone else is thinking: in the end, it will be those who achieve results who receive the most carbon income. Another reassuring lesson is that there are no real differences between the villages: the distribution choices are fairly homogenous.

At the very end of the tarpaulin exercise, we asked each village ‘how much of your carbon revenue would you be prepared to share freely with your village? Most of the participants said they would be willing to share around 10% of their carbon revenue with their community. This would enable the villages to develop their infrastructure (wells, market gardening, health post, school, etc.).

We also spoke to the land families about their opportunity costs. Indeed, if these farmers lend land to be reforested, they are potentially giving up income from their crops. We therefore immersed ourselves with them in the details of hillside rice cultivation to understand every aspect (yields, expenditure, length of crops, fallow periods, etc.).

 

In all, 255 people in the 26 villages, or 88% of all the family plots, took part in this deliberative process. For arboRise, participatory reforestation is not an empty word. It’s essential that everyone has their say so that everyone takes ownership of the project.

Thank you to the Somaha Foundation for helping to make this consultation possible.

In our experience, leaders are one of the levers of change in any organisation or social group. And our process also aims to facilitate the emergence of new leaders, legitimised by transparent elections in their village, then at sub-prefectoral level, within the Cooperative. Of course, the current political leaders (sub-prefect, mayor of Linko, village chiefs) are involved in the process. They are delighted with the momentum generated by the project in the region. Indeed, we are convinced that it is the networking of leaders (old and new!) that will be decisive.

In October last year we founded the Cooperative of the field-families in Linko to manage the new arboRise forests as a common asset (see our report here), and on 9 July 2024 the Cooperative’s General Meeting was held. This year it was a question of electing the organs of the cooperative:

In preparation for the election of the 26 members of the Comité Coopératif, each village had previously elected two representatives, one man and one woman. At the General Assembly, we simply used a hat in which 14 women’s tickets and 12 men’s tickets were placed. Each village drew a ticket at random and that’s how we ended up with a Cooperative Committee made up of a majority of women, all recognised in their village, and therefore visible at sub-prefecture level.

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In some circles, there is a great deal of self-pity about the condition of African women. For our part, we have observed tangible signs of their influence, which contradict this image of weakness. In one village in the sub-prefecture, for example, the women deposed the village chief, who was reluctant for the village to join the project! Another example: it’s a woman from the village of Booko who heads the brotherhood of hunters for the whole sub-prefecture, an extremely powerful position that implies significant customary powers. Third clue: the fact that a majority of women were required to sit on the cooperative committee was never contested or even debated. To close this parenthesis, here’s some inspiring reading on the subject: L’autre langue des femmes von Léonora Miano.

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…Then we moved on to the election of the 5 members of the Administration. The cooperators from each village first chose the candidate from their village, then the whole room voted by a show of hands for each candidate, and the 5 with the most votes were elected. We are very pleased that Imam Bangaly Condé has been elected Director of Administration. He is well educated, has lived in Côte d’Ivoire for a long time and has been involved in the project in an exemplary way right from the start.

The day after the General Meeting, we organised a training session for the 5 members of the administration and the 26 members of the Co-operative Committee and their substitutes to prepare them for their role and responsibilities.

• For the Administration, it’s simple: they have to manage the budget and organise the next General Meeting (and thus relieve our partner GUIDRE, who has been doing this until now).
• For the Cooperative Committee, it’s more difficult: they have to mandate the measuring machines to visit and evaluate each plot of land, and then, on the basis of their report, work out a key for distributing the carbon income. It is certainly not up to arboRise to define the criteria for distributing this income. This choice must be made by the people concerned, based on local traditions and customs.

But what criteria should be used to distribute carbon revenues? Find out here.