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Micro-Loans Video |
Beekeeping — “No trees, no bees. No honey, no money!” For a long time, we have thought that beekeeping would be a fun project to get involved with, but this last trip has been very enlightening. In our approach to protect forest areas, we needed to establish a viable reason to keep them so that communities could see the value of keeping forests rather than cutting them down. In all truth, forests don't immediately offer communities much benefit and, when they see an area of trees, rather than saying how beautiful they look, they tend to feel it would be better to cut them down and grow cassava. Beekeeping, however, can hopefully change this. |
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We had a very interesting meeting with Pam Gregory, a beekeeper from the UK, who has set up a honey-producing project near Nkhata Bay, and she gave us lots of information about beekeeping in Malawi. Our vision is to establish groups of beekeepers who will look after beehives in nominated forest areas. These beekeepers will be enabled with a loan from RIPPLE Africa, which will be paid back over two years, to purchase individually up to 10 beehives. They will then realise the value of maintaining the forests and will naturally protect the forests from bush fires and deforestation. The first project is to be started on a beautiful forested hill at Kafuli. There will be 50 beehives in this forest and 10 members. RIPPLE Africa will gain valuable knowledge on the viability of this sort of business so that we can hopefully establish many more beekeeping businesses in the future. We need to raise funds for... |
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