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Income Generation
Community / The New Forests Company
The New Forests Company’s community development strategy focuses on primary health and education interventions initially. Once those long-term improvement projects are set up, NFC moves more heavily into income generation projects. The main income generation project that NFC has been carrying out since its first season of planting are seedling-giveaways and road improvement. NFC is currently looking into apiculture, fruit trees, agro-forestry, maize milling facilities for agricultural value addition, and technical support for savings and credit cooperatives, among others. NFC feels that income generation projects are very important for community empowerment as well as the success of its other community development projects, because if the community cannot support themselves, they will have a hard time maintaining the other projects.
Seedling Giveaway
When His Excellency President Museveni visited Namwasa plantation in 2006 to officially open the planting season, he challenged NFC to share their expertise and seedlings with the surrounding communities both for conservation and income generation. Since then, NFC has given away over 350,000 seedlings to the local communities and is planning to give away another 250,000 seedlings in 2008. NFC contributes the seedlings and technical expertise and the communities contribute their labor and other costs in planting and maintenance. This benefits the company in many ways:
- If people plant trees around NFC’s borders they will be much more cautious to prevent fires to protect their trees, which then protects NFC’s trees as well.
- If people have their own trees which they can use for firewood, they will not be tempted to try to cut down NFC’s trees.
- If people make money from the trees, they will be appreciative to NFC and take a keen interest in tree planting.
- If people are well trained in tree planting and maintenance and patient enough to wait 8 -10 years, NFC guarantees them a market and will buy back their grown trees increasing NFC’s timber quantity.
NFC is currently in the process of transitioning the seedling giveaway programme into a professional outgrowers scheme in order to provide more support, training, and management for the tree planters. This would be beneficial for the tree planters because their trees would be higher quality and more valuable; it would also be beneficial to NFC by improving its yield.
School Woodlots
NFC expanded its seedling giveaway programme to surrounding primary schools who were eagerly requesting seedlings. NFC provides the seeds, while the pupils and parents contribute the labour and other costs for planting and maintenance. Schools appreciate the school woodlot projects for many reasons. Not only does it provide the school with an additional source of income, but it also provides a practical educational tool for science, conservation, and economics curricula. The school woodlots promote the importance of conservation and tree planting from a very young age which impacts both the pupils and their parents generations. The woodlots also provide a source of firewood to cook the schools meals which can be both costly and inconvenient to collect.
Road Construction
Another challenge the communities identified in the Participatory Rural Appraisal exercise was poor roads and lack of access to market. NFC has had to create and maintain many kilometres of roads on plantation for operations. It has also graded and maintained about 45 km of community roads. The communities provide the unskilled labour to clear and then maintain the roads and NFC provides the machinery and fuel. The community has really appreciated this project because it eases their access to local markets and makes them more mobile by shortening the amount of time it takes to get from one place to another.
Our current projects are:
