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ENVIRONMENT
Senior
Chiefs Visit the Deforested Area of Chikwawa
Deforestation is a major problem in Malawi but, fortunately, Nkhata
Bay District (the area in which we are operating) still has lots of
forest areas. In the south of the country, however, nearly all areas
have been deforested, and in most places there are no large trees as
far as the eye can see. We were told about an area called Chikwawa,
which is particularly badly deforested, where there is devastating soil
erosion. Aleke Banda, our MP, suggested that we should take all of the
senior chiefs in Nkhata Bay District to visit Chikwawa. Force, our environmental
projects manager, organised this trip, and the chiefs were horrified
to see what is happening in their own country. This trip made a real
impression on the chiefs, and they have been galvanised into action
to try and prevent the same thing happening in their area. RIPPLE Africa
has funded awareness meetings with the senior chiefs and some of their
400 village headmen. We see this as the start of our environmental awareness
programme. |
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The Senior
Chiefs learning about deforestation and how it is affecting the
communities at Chikwawa |
One of the
heavily deforested and eroded hills at Chikwawa |
If individuals
do not grow their own trees, they will have no wood in the future
for cooking, etc. |
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Tree
Planting Programme 2007-2008
Our tree planting programme has developed very quickly over the past
two years and, with the small resources that we have had, the RIPPLE
Africa staff and the communities have achieved amazing results. We have
had a very successful tree planting programme during the last 12 months,
and 1,250,000 tree seedlings have been raised in 137 tree nurseries
— we estimate that we now have about 3,000 people working on this
project. Last year, many of the trees were planted in a variety of areas,
and it was difficult to monitor and manage these trees. This year, through
the guidance of our new supervisors, we have encouraged communities
to plant the majority of trees in a few selected areas. This will mean
that monitoring and caring for the trees will be easier. It is important
to make sure that communities look after these trees for at least the
first two years by clearing the grass from around each tree, preventing
bush burning, and preventing goats from roaming freely in these areas.
Also, by protecting these areas, trees that have previously been cut
down will be given the chance to grow again. This secondary growth will
provide diversity and, because the trees will have established roots,
they will grow more quickly and more successfully than the newly planted
trees. |
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RIPPLE Africa
staff promoting the “Care for the Trees of Malawi”
campaign |
One of the
137 RIPPLE Africa tree nurseries |
David Banda,
a forest guard, with one of the community tree nursery members |
Recently
planted trees at Kachere Primary School — growing quickly! |
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We will be changing
the emphasis of the project during 2008 to provide much more awareness
training and monitoring. We have certainly experienced failures where
trees have been planted and then, in the dry season, bush fires have
killed a number of them. Our goal for this year is to maintain the
existing 137 nurseries and only to establish an additional 23 nurseries.
We now have four
supervisors, two assistant supervisors, and two awareness training
officers employed on the tree planting programme. All of these staff
live locally and are working hard to achieve the goals set by RIPPLE
Africa.
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Alupro
Fruit Tree Growing Project — An Exciting Start!
In June 2007, Alupro sponsored our fruit tree project. Our aim was to
establish a fruit tree nursery at Mwaya with a greenhouse for grafting
and budding, and to grow fruit trees in some of the community tree nurseries.
The communities and the RIPPLE Africa staff have been so excited and
enthusiastic about this programme that we have extended the fruit tree
project to all of our nurseries. They have been growing lemon trees
as hardy root stock for oranges and tangerines, mangos for grafting,
guavas and pawpaws, and some avocados. These improved fruit trees will
provide valuable income generation from the sale of the tree seedlings
and eventually the sale of fruit. Also, local communities will benefit
from eating the fruit.
We held a very exciting meeting with the senior chiefs and gave them
navel oranges, purchased from a supermarket in Lilongwe and imported
from South Africa. They had never seen oranges like these before, and
our aim is for communities to be able to grow large, juicy oranges in
the future. We have already organised the purchase of budwood from improved
orange and tangerine trees to be budded on to the hardy lemon stock.
In November 2007, Cherry Hamson, the Communications Director for Alupro,
visited Mwaya to see how the project was developing. Cherry is very
passionate about this project being an enormous success. She is promoting
the project with local authorities and schools in the UK, and many of
them have featured the project in their magazines and websites. |
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The new
Alupro greenhouse under construction — this will be used
for grafting and budding |
Preparing
a local mango for graiting onto an improved mango |
Hardy lemons
and guavas — we estimate that over 200,000 fruit trees have
been grown this season |
Introducing
oranges to the Senior Chiefs — they had never seen oranges
like these before! |
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The
Mbaula Projects Are Really Taking Off!
When we visited Malawi in May 2007, we were rather disappointed with
the progress being made with our mbaula project. After talking with
Linda, the manager in charge of the project, we were delighted to see
a massive improvement in the programme in October. Linda had really
taken on board the ethos of RIPPLE Africa and had developed an improved
and simpler method of construction to provide more uniform mbaulas.
She had also established an impressive training programme for the groups
of mbaula makers, and we now have an ideal model which we are replicating
in different areas. Each group is given, on a loan basis, equipment
and materials, and we build their kiln and shelters for them. This all
costs about £200, and we expect the groups to pay back this money
over a two year period so that it can then be re-invested in future
projects.
We visited several community training programmes and were pleased to
see that all RIPPLE Africa staff have been trained to make mbaula —
even Amos, the driver, had been trained so that his time could be used
productively rather than just sitting around waiting. One group of ladies
had just fired their first batch of 50 mbaula when we visited them,
and we heard later that all of the mbaula had been sold the following
day after they had held a demonstration in their village. Our goal is
for communities to produce 20,000 mbaula of these units per year. We
estimate that this will save 1.6 million trees per year and generate
a valuable income for 200-300 families. |
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One of the
mbaula training days — everyone has a go, even Amos our
driver! |
These were
fired one day and all sold the next! |
Linda, the
mbaula project manager, and
her assistant Lianna |
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Introducing
Micro-Loans
As RIPPLE Africa develops, we find that everything we do is inter-related.
For example, if you are encouraging people to plant trees, this will
have an impact on agriculture. Education is important for people to
understand environmental issues and health issues, etc. The future for
countries like Malawi cannot be just reliance on aid. Aid in the past
just has not worked, and people in Malawi are poorer now than they have
ever been. Our philosophy of providing a hand up rather than a hand
out means that we are trying to enable Malawians to help themselves.
In order to do this, there are two components that are vital. The first
is money and the second is food. To generate food and money, you really
need business and trade but the rural Malawians have no money to get
started and, invariably, the sort of businesses that they can start
up are to do with farming of one type or another.
We have recently read a very inspiring book by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel
prize winner who started the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (the book is
called "Banker to the Poor"). With the ideas from this book,
RIPPLE Africa is now venturing into new areas (for example, fish farming
and bee-keeping), and we believe that by providing micro-loans for groups
of people enables them to establish viable businesses. If RIPPLE Africa
is to loan this money, we need to be assured that the loan and interest
will be paid back to re-invest in future projects. So what we have decided
to do is to establish some pilot projects to learn and understand these
businesses so that we can give valuable guidance to people who take
out loans in the future. |
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Fish
Farming
Due to over-fishing and increased population, fishermen are finding
it increasingly difficult to catch fish in Lake Malawi. In the mid
1970s, the average Malawian consumed 14kg of fish a year — today,
that figure is less than 4kg — a drastic reduction. We had heard
about inland fish farms and, on our last trip, we had a meeting with
the head of the Fisheries Department in Nkhata Bay, Stan Banda, and
two local fisheries extension workers to find out about this. It would
appear that there are charities who are paying for inland fish ponds
to be dug and are then providing small fish (fingerings), but that's
where the projects seem to end and very few of these are successful.
We asked Stan how we could develop a fish farming programme that was
successful and, in short, there needs to be ownership of the ponds
and a fully integrated approach with proper feeding to provide an
environment to grow larger fish which could command higher prices.
This money can then be re-invested to develop the programmes.
We decided to
establish three projects: Project 1 involves four women and four ponds,
and Project 2 involves four men and four ponds. These two groups will
work in competition with each other to make the most money. The third
project, Project 3, comprises a group of 10 fish ponds, and these
are owned by a group of individuals but are managed and run on a commercial
basis. All three projects are being established on a micro-loan basis,
and Alex, the local fisheries extension worker, is working closely
with each group to ensure success of the projects. Already, 16 ponds,
measuring 20m ´ 20m ´ 1m to 1.5m deep, have been dug,
and fingerings (small fish) are being introduced. The integrated approach
means that we will also be keeping goats, chickens and ducks which,
apart from the obvious benefits of meat, eggs, etc., will provide
droppings to feed the plankton which will in turn give protein to
the fish. There will also be a regime of good quality balanced feeding
to promote good fish growth to enable the groups to maximise income.
We will obviously
have setbacks, but our aim is to have three very successful fish pond
projects which can be used as an example for future RIPPLE Africa
and other fish pond projects. We will be reporting on progress of
this project after our next visit in May/June 2008.
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| A
farmed chambo fish |
Fish
farming needs to be integrated with chickens and goats for best
results |
Newly
dug 20m×20m fish ponds at Chiomba — there are 10 ponds |
Pond
digging at Ngoli — so far six ponds have been dug here in
total |
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Bee-Keeping
— “No trees, no bees. No honey, no money!”
For a long time, we have thought that bee-keeping 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. Bee-keeping, however, can
hopefully change this.
We had a very interesting meeting with Pam Gregory, a bee-keeper from
the UK, who has set up a honey-producing project near Nkhata Bay, and
she gave us lots of information about bee-keeping in Malawi. Our vision
is to establish groups of bee-keepers who will look after beehives in
nominated forest areas. These bee-keepers 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 bee-keeping businesses in the future. |
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| Bee keeping
can protect the forests.
“No trees, no bees. No honey, no money!” |
A typical
top bar bee hive — communities will own and manage these
hives to generate income and honey |
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Vegetable
Growing Business
We have established a number of vegetable businesses with varying degrees
of success. Vegetables are much needed in rural Malawi to improve nutrition.
There are several factors which will produce a good vegetable business;
you need the right location, and a committed individual who has vision,
ability, and a good work ethic, and, last but not least, a desire to
make money. Some of the first projects have been community ones, without
real ownership of the project by an individual to drive it. These projects
have, in certain cases, not even recovered the initial outlay.
One project that has been very successful is Kaipah’s vegetable
garden. We went to visit his amazing garden after he had made the effort
to visit us with some of his produce which were some of the best locally
produced vegetables that we had seen. After the tour of his garden,
his wife, Elimasi, produced a wonderful mixed vegetable dish with rice
for us to eat. It was so tasty!
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| Kaipah
visited Mwaya with this wonderful vegetable selection |
A
visit to Kaipah’s garden |
A
delicious home cooked mixed vegetable meal — really tasty! |
Healthy
vegetables and
a desire to suceed |
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Several
weeks later, Kaipah came to see us with a proposal. We sat down together
and went through the figures and came up with a micro-loan plan so that
he could employ staff and set up a larger commercial vegetable growing
business. He ended up borrowing MK75,000 (about £270 or US$540).
This will be paid back with 20% interest within one year. We are conviced
that he will make a success of this. The first good indication was that,
when we gave him the cash, he immediately gave it to his wife for safe-keeping.
We will be visiting him on our next trip to see how progress is going
but initial reports are good.
This project will be an interesting case study for future vegetable
garden projects. Watch this space! |
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Fruit
Drying
This year, we organised a group of women to start drying mangoes in
good time before the rains really started in earnest. Michael, a RIPPLE
Africa volunteer, was keen to get involved with this project. We carried
out market testing and were suprised to find that very few local people
had ever tasted dried mango before. RIPPLE Africa purchased a large
number of small plastic bags so that the dried mangoes can be packed
and marketed by the women when the mango season has finished to see
if people are interested in purchasing them at other times of the year.
If this is successful, it will give the group confidence to expand the
project next year. |
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Three of the women
from the fruit drying group drying mangoes on racks in the sun |
Michael was keen
to get involved with this project |
Dried mangoes packaged
for sale |
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Major
Deforestation Is Still Going on in the Hills Behind Kande |
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These hill sare being
deforested to grow 2-3 crops of mountain rice — the wood
is just burnt where it falls |
Beautiful, large
hardwood trees are ringed to kill
the tree so that cassava can be grown |
These steep
deforested slopes are
heavily eroded after the first rains |
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Company
Registration No. 04823686 •
UK Registered Charity No. 1103256 |
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