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Overview
Community / The New Forests Company
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a fundamental aspect of The New Forests Company’s innovative business model. CSR makes financial sense by reducing security costs and mitigating future risks, as prevention is always cheaper than treatment. Instead of investing high amounts of money down the line in security and risk mitigation, NFC invests in the communities surrounding its plantations from the beginning with the view that if the communities have a vested interest in the success of NFC then they will work to promote and protect it. NFC has seen many exploitative investments in Africa and believes in a win-win investment model that uses foreign capital to profitably finance a company that has positive economic, social and environmental benefits on the ground. NFC is proof that this win-win situation is possible.
NFC’s CSR philosophy incorporates the main pillars of the Global Reporting Index (GRI) and published its first annual sustainability report in 2009. This report is available upon request.
NFC is currently planting in Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique. Our largest planting and community programme is in Uganda. NFC has also made a substantial investment in the communities in Mozambique. We look forward to expanding the model into Tanzania upon the completion of its first planting season in early 2010. As NFC expands into other countries like Rwanda and Swaziland, it will expand this same model into locally adapted community development strategies and programmes.
Community Development Policies
Our mission for community development is to help communities help themselves. While many development interventions over the past few decades have perpetuated the dependency mindset, NFC’s projects exist to challenge this by empowering the communities to achieve their own objectives. The communities are then appreciative of NFC for these partnerships, but not dependent on NFC.
Based on our core values and experience over the past few years, NFC has developed best practice policies that govern the design and implementation of all of its community development projects.
Demand Driven: the first exercise NFC conducts when it begins operations in an area is a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), which trains leaders from the communities to identify their own challenges and potential solutions. All future projects come from these recommendations ensuring that the projects are “bottom-up.”
Partnerships: NFC implements all of its projects in partnership with the communities, both to prove their interest in the project and to encourage their ownership over the outcome. The community participates in the choice and design of the project and contributes to the materials or labour needed to carry it out.
Sustainability: all projects are designed to have a sustainable impact, meaning that when NFC ceases all funding to the project upon completion, the impact continues through the participation and management of the community.
Measurable Impact: as a private company, with obligations to its shareholders, NFC is determined to show a measurable Social Return on Investment (SRoI) through an effective monitoring and evaluation system for all projects.
Location: in order to have a strategic impact, all NFC’s projects are done within the parishes surrounding the plantations.
Our current projects are:
