By donating to this project, you will help RIPPLE Africa continue to protect Malawi’s forested hills. Forest conservation is expensive. Staff salaries, meetings, fuel, transport, and education programmes all cost money. However, RIPPLE Africa’s forest conservation project runs largely on a grassroots basis, utilising local partnerships and volunteer committees to make the project as cost effective as possible.
Deforestation in Africa is a huge problem, and in Malawi, an area of forest the size of a football pitch is cut down every 10 minutes! For this reason RIPPLE Africa runs a forest conservation project in Malawi, Africa. This has one ultimate aim:
We are doing this by:
For years, RIPPLE Africa has worked to fight deforestation in Malawi through tree planting and fuel-efficient cookstove projects.
However, while RIPPLE Africa has been fighting deforestation in populated lowland areas, the charity has watched in sadness as the mature indigenous forests in the hills of Malawi’s Nkhata Bay District continue to disappear.
These forested hills are a primary factor in regulating the annual rainfall in the area and, frustratingly, deforestation here is pointless:
Just a handful of farmers are responsible for all this destruction through the practice of shifting cultivation. The practice is appalling, selfish, and illegal in Malawi. However, in the hills there is no regulation, so it continues unabated. The farmers:
RIPPLE Africa is doing everything it can to combat deforestation in Malawi on all fronts. However, RIPPLE Africa’s forest conservation project is special as it is not only targeting deforestation, but it is also saving the forested hills responsible for regulating much of the rainfall in the district! With 90% of the population in Malawi gaining their income from subsistence farming, rainfall and climate stability are not just issues for environmentalists, they are inextricably linked to poverty, health, and survival for local people.
RIPPLE Africa started the project in the Kandoli Hills in 2010. Protected areas were identified, bylaws were passed, and the RIPPLE Africa forest conservation project was born – making TV, radio, and newspaper headlines in Malawi!
The project has been very successful and people who have broken the new bylaws have been arrested, charged and fined and in some cases sent to prison.
In addition, the project is highlighting the importance of forest conservation to local people.
In 2010, RIPPLE Africa held a series of meetings with the District Commissioner, the District Forestry Department, Traditional Authorities (Senior Chiefs), Village Headmen, and volunteer Conservation Committee Members at community level to discuss the options for protecting the forested hills and reducing deforestation in Malawi.
The joint committee learned they had the power to create local bylaws to legally protect their own forest land. Many Traditional Authorities and Village Headmen had been writing to RIPPLE Africa for years, begging the charity for help on the issue forest conservation and deforestation, and now RIPPLE Africa could help them to take action.
Local Traditional Authorities, Village Headmen, and Conservation Committees nominated the areas they wanted to protect, and RIPPLE Africa worked with the senior officials to draft the bylaws which banned all farming, burning, wood harvesting, and settlement in the protected forest hills.
Passing the bylaws was essential, but success depends on constant monitoring. RIPPLE Africa is working in partnership with the Nkhata Bay District Forestry Department to patrol the protected areas, and employs additional forest guards, provides the fuel and motorbikes necessary to patrol such a huge area, and holds regular meetings with the Conservation Committees to ascertain reports of any illegal activity in the protected forests.
RIPPLE Africa’s environmental team also works with the local communities to educate people on the importance of forest conservation and the dangers of deforestation in Malawi, as well as explaining the bylaws, answer questions and promoting sustainable environmental practice which benefits the community, such as RIPPLE Africa’s Tree Planting Project.
We will continue to fund additional forest guards, provide transport for patrols and meet with the Conservation Committees to ascertain reports of any illegal activity in the protected areas of the Kandoli forest.
We are also introducing the project into the forested hills between Chintheche in the middle and Tukombo in the south of the Nkhata Bay District.
With these ongoing projects we are doing are best to reduce deforestation in Malawi.
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