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.
