Social Forestry in Uganda: Setting a Precedent

Dear Project Supporter,

Organic Perspectives would like to bring you a few updates from our work with rural farmers in Uganda.

Flashback:

For the biggest time of the year, an almost-continuous part of our work is taking visitors to several local households where we have either installed a household biogas plant or supplied a fuel-efficient woodstove—besides the farmers’ groups that we provide with tree seed and agroforestry training.

With a relatively meager source of funding, our nonprofit is generally not scaling our activities to new communities for much of the year, but the work we have done in the last 7 years is itself often much to keep us in the field most of the time. And we are ultimately sure to build continuity, ideally in a self sufficient manner—if our goal for the “Uganda Community Farm” finally holds. Read on.

We have particularly found our innovations in the area of sustainable household energy to be just as appealing to local farmers and our project visitors—as do our reforestation and organic agriculture part of it.

Our latest 2 visitors from the US (see photo) therefore weren’t held back by the Christmas holiday. They were already having their sleeves rolled up and their hands dirty in the mud—sharing experiences and providing practical training to our farmers in Kamuli—as early as Jan 2, 2014 (after leaving their home country on new year’s eve) . We had no way of sharing more of our field photos via this report, but we shall be sure to upload many of them in the gallery on this page, and on our website.

Strategizing for the Sustainability of our Work:

We would like to focus briefly on the theme for this report.

Towards the end of 2013—as you might have learned about—we pushed ahead an establishment campaign for our newest project: the Uganda Community Farm. This, unfortunately, wasn’t successful.

You will realize from the above link that our purpose for the farm was, and still is, twofold:

1. Building financial self sufficiency for our nonprofit in scaling our ongoing work with rural farmers on community forestry, alternative household energy and organic gardening
2. Creating a practical organic farming learning center for the farmers that we work with—providing them with hands-on training on high income-generating organic horticulture systems.

With the failure of the farm’s previous establishment campaign, we haven’t given up on the future. Presently, we have generally scaled down on the farm’s establishment needs, and we are contemplating making the most modest start we can with our own hands—then seek expansion support later.

See our 2014 Business Plan for the Uganda Community Farm here.

How You Can Help:

1. If you or any of your networks could connect us with an interest free Microcredit Program to get our vision for the Uganda Community Farm off the ground, our envisaged total payback timeframe is the end of Year 1. Please study our Business Plan in detail, to see exactly what and how we plan to do this.

1. On February 12, 2014, GlobalGiving will be matching all donations to our projects at 30%. As we aggressively pursue a vision for self sufficiency, you could vitally help us sustain our operations by supporting us this way—and by spreading word about our work.

Thank you very much for your continued support!