News and Activities

“On International Women’s Rights Day, let’s celebrate the strength, resilience and beauty of all women! Happy Birthday to all the women of arboRise-Guidre! #8March” Seny Balamou, silviculturist on the Linko-Damaro team Our project would be nothing without all the women involved. …as seed harvesters, …as members of the Community Management Committees, …as village delegates on the Cooperative Committee, …as scorers, …as supervisors, …as foresters: … multiple roles for multiple talents. THANK YOU ladies for your decisive actions! A must-read for this March 8: L’autre langue des femmes, by Léonora Miano.

Diassodou, here we are ! The 2025 reforestation campaign has just begun, with three teams of five people in the field! Remember that arboRise is currently active in two regions: In Linko – Damaro – Konsankoro (zone 1, marked in green below). In Samana – Diassodou&Karala – Sokourala – Koumandou (Zone 2, marked in blue below) The plan for Zone 1 forsees the reforestation of 500 hectares per year. Spreading the efforts over several years made it possible to keep the required resources within reasonable limits. The disadvantage is that CO2 sequestration and thus carbon revenues are very low over many years. For this reason, we have opted for a tighter schedule in Zone 2, with a second planting cycle starting one year after the first cycle. So, after starting the reforestation in the sub-prefecture of Samana in 2024, we will start the measures in the sub-prefecture of Diassodou in

We’ve been able to carry out the validation audit of our project 😊 For the South Pole technical team, Nicolò, Tosca and Nele, this is the culmination of a lot of hard work and effort. They are the ones who drew up the Project Description Document submitted to Gold Standard and audited in the field over the last few days. This document describes how our project meets all the requirements of the certification standard. Before starting the audit, we spent a few days preparing with our partners from South Pole and GUIDRE. Our aim was to make the auditors’ work as easy as possible by planning activities with the villages and preparing the necessary documents. Of course, as before an exam, it was an opportunity to rehearse together the strong points of our project and to anticipate any ‘trick’ questions. But as we all know, it’s not just before an

As in Linko in spring 2024, we are also distributing individual and collective equipment in the sub-prefecture of Samana. The mayor and sub-prefect of the rural district of Samana are of course involved in this event. The picture shows a harrow for the plough and, above all, a metal fence to protect the women’s market gardening areas from stray cattle.  

The second half of the year is mainly devoted to establishing monitoring plots on a representative sample of land. These plots will be used to measure tree growth over a 20-year period. Each plot is a circle 14.11 metres in diameter, the center of which must be fixed and the circumference marked out. To guarantee representativeness, we estimate that 40 monitoring plots per 500 ha stratum will be sufficient to reduce the uncertainty interval below the target values defined by the standard. The final sample size will be determined according to the heterogeneity of the vegetation in the field. Our partner South Pole randomly determines the location of the plots (on which plots and where in the field). South Pole has also created a digital form that allows the GUIDRE team to send measurement results directly to South Pole. …because it’s not just a question of establishing the plot, but

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

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. —- In some circles, there is a great deal of self-pity about the condition of African women. For our