The young shoots from our spring reforestation campaign are already looking good ! It only took the six months of the rainy season for them to take firm root in the soil. Unlike nursery-raised plants, they do not suffer from the shock of transplanting and their root system is stronger. Fortunately, their survival in the dry season depends on the depth of their roots.
It is also interesting to note that these young shoots have germinated despite strong competition from weeds. So the clearing that we are asking the families who own the land may not be necessary…
These young shoots must now escape from the goats who like woody plants (cattle prefer herbaceous plants). The second threat to the saplings is bushfire. This is why we encourage landowning families to plant hedgerows (barriers against cattle) and build firebreaks around the land.
Die Volkart Stiftung unterstützt die Aktivitäten von arboRise in den nächsten drei Jahren nachhaltig mit einer jährlichen Großspende. Dieser Beitrag und die Arbeit von arboRise stehen ganz im Zeichen der Vision der Volkart Stiftung: “Die Vision eine Gesellschaft, in der die Menschen respektvoll zusammenleben, ihre Meinung informiert bilden und der Umwelt Sorge tragen. Dafür unterstützt die Volkart Stiftung seit Generationen Projekte und Institutionen, welche den Gemeinsinn innerhalb der Gesellschaft unterstützen, unkonventionelle Ansätze fördern und öffentliche Reflexionsräume schaffen.” Der Ausschuss von arboRise ist sehr dankbar für die Anerkennung, die diese Spende und die damit einhergehende Beratung und Vernetzung mit sich bringt: ein großes DANKESCHÖN!
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.
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:
to make our action known in images to convince new people to support us
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.
At the annual general assembly, the members of the association met to review the activities of the past 12 months since the foundation of arboRise. The results are extremely positive, both in terms of our impact on the field and in terms of funding, research and communication activities.
With the active support of our members, the committee is committed to continuing to develop our activities with the same momentum. After 150 hectares, our goal is to reforest 400 hectares by the next general assembly in September 2022.
Thank you to our many members for their encouragement!
arboRise takes part to the Festival Objectif Terre, in a quite mineral and urban atmosphere 😉 …because the Festival has decided to occupy the site of the Galicienne, on the outskirts of Lausanne.
Thank you to all those who visited us at the stand. What good exchanges !
…many families are there with their children…
…a Swiss nurse living in Banjul (Gambia) came to say hello as a “neighbour”…
…a father and his family tribe who are reforesting a plot of land near their home using the Forêt Gourmande method…
…a mother and her daughter very active on TikTok…
…a person in charge of sustainable development in a town on the coast…
…young and not so young, people from here and elsewhere, a beautiful diversity whose common point is the mobilization for the environment. Thank you to the Festival for making such a mobilisation possible!
The Vajra Foundation for Humanitarian and Sustainable Development is supporting arboRise’s work for Guinean women with a substantial donation. We would like to thank the foundation committee and its president for their support!
With our participation model, we promote the involvement of women farmers in reforestation activities. Their work is remunerated on an equal basis with that of men, in accordance with our ethical principles. The financial contribution of the Vajra Foundation will be used in particular to strengthen this aspect of our activities.
Those who would like to learn more about the context in which the women of Upper Guinea live will be fascinated to read Mabetty Touré’s thesis “Les rapports de genre et la filière néré en Haute Guinée” (2104, Université de Toulouse). In this detailed study, we discover how the exploitation of the néré seed by women is able to increase their autonomy
“Gender asymmetries consisting of differences and inequalities are sometimes transformed in response to changes in society as well as to changes in socio-economic conditions. It is in this context that many women in Upper Guinea have taken initiatives and are currently involved in the exploitation of néré, a harvested product used as a condiment, which gives them greater autonomy and access to the means of production. They join collective organisations and increasingly move to distant horizons, thus overturning the old hierarchy of power based on gender and age.”
