In Linko, seed families become ‘measurers’. The three-year planting cycle came to an end in 2024 and it is no longer necessary to collect seeds to sow new plots at Linko. In order to maintain the link with the 370 seed families (mainly women), we have suggested that they take on a new and equally essential role, that of “measurers”.
Every year, it is vital to know the state of each of the 840 plots reforested since 2021. So it will be the scorers who will visit the plots to assess the growth of the trees and check that they are being properly cared for by the land families.
In each village, we have set up pairs of women measurers, who will be responsible for visiting 5 to 7 plots in a nearby village (to avoid any form of social pressure). In all, 187 pairs for the 840 plots in the project. Since 99% of the women (there are also men among the seed-families – and we have, of course, ensured that the pairs are not mixed) are illiterate, each pair will be accompanied by a local ‘guide’, from the Community Management Committees in each village, who knows how to use a smartphone.
In each of our 26 villages, our supervisors have identified a person who knows how to use a smartphone. These people were to be trained to use the QField geolocation application and to enter data in an online questionnaire. But when the training took place with the 26 people, we realised that not all of them had a smartphone… We had to buy 19 smartphones. Then we noticed that their use of smartphones was limited to making phone calls and watching videos… That’s just the way things are! In the end, only 5 out of the 26 could really act as guides for the measuring machines. So we had to find other guides (otherwise the 5 local guides would have had 75 days each). We recruited them from among the ISAV students who had come to do an internship on our project in 2023. Then we had to adapt the schedule to take account of the students’ obligations (graduation) and Ramadan (some husbands might have been reluctant to have their wives act as measurers during Lent).
The measurers started their visits at the beginning of April and finished at the beginning of May, just in time to prepare for the meeting of the cooperative committee before the General Meeting of the land families.
The 187 teams of measurers:
- Visited 703 plots of land
- Walked more than 650 kilometres in the plots of land
- Measured 13,278 project trees (under 5m) and 5,174 trees that already existed before the project (> 5m)
- Assessed each time: the impact of fires, the quality of land maintenance and the risks due to livestock.
It’s a high-quality piece of work for a first attempt. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen! And thank you, because it allows the project and the family plots to know exactly which plots are well (or not so well) maintained and where the trees are growing well (or not so well). This makes it easy to provide targeted recommendations to each field-family to make the necessary corrections. And what’s more, this data corresponds to the satellite images!
