Trees&Life in Senegal:
20 million trees, 100,000 hectares of protected forests, 130,000 people in 90 benefiting villages in Upper Casamance.
Goals
Trees&Life Senegal aims to bring, by way of the tree, sustainable and durable responses to the main curses that affect Senegalese villages: desertification, rural exodus and food insecurity.
Project area
The project takes place in Upper Casamance, in the Vélingara Department, one of the three Departments in the Kolda Region. Upper Casamance is the poorest region and the least concerned by international aid in Senegal. A former agricultural granary, Upper Casamance is now cut off from much of the country. It remains one of the few zones whose forest clumps are still intact but their condition is deteriorating day by day.
Activities
The aims of the project initiated in 2008 with Mozdahir Développement NGO are as follows:
Planting 20 million useful trees
The types of tree, their uses and the plantation equipment are selected after consultation with the village population and diagnosis of local needs, supported by the technical and scientific expertise of the project partners.
The principle is to provide villages with tree nurseries and involve the communities in the reforestation by supplying them with seeds and agricultural inputs. In return, the villagers provide their labour for the plantation and take charge of the follow-up care for the trees once these have been planted: such is the participative reforestation principle.
In exchange for producing seedlings in nurseries, planting and taking care of the trees during their whole lifetime, the villagers are “rewarded” in successive stages according to a non-monetary system that stimulates their commitment to the project and their ownership of it. This "reward" benefits the community rather than the individual.
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Protecting 100,000 hectares of forests through community action
The approach inspired from the Senegalese Integrated Ecosystem Management Programme (PGIES) and developed by Trees&Life, consists in grouping several villages into a community management unit whose objective is the participative management of the forest fragment shared amongst the villages, which averages about 15,000 hectares in size.
Managed in this way, the forest becomes eligible for Community-based Forest status, which grants to local communities usufruct of services and produce from the forest. The Community-based Forest is a determination about land use by a rural committee for a group of villages, supported by the sub-prefect. It is not a title deed but grants ownership rights over all produce from the land and, as long as the management plan is observed, these rights cannot be withdrawn.
Creating a Community-based Forest involves resolving behaviours prejudicial to the environment: clarifying property rights by entrusting them to rural communities, and promoting sustainable alternative activities in order to reduce anthropic pressures on forests.
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Harvesting rainwater
Various equipments, ranging from stony cord to sand barrier, are built with the villagers in order to harvest the greatest possible quantity of water and prevent it from escaping (storage), and then reinject it into the soil (infiltration). Feasibility studies are in progress with associations specialized in the realization of such equipments.
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Beneficiaries
The project will directly impact 90 villages from 6 rural communities in the Vélingara Department in Upper Casamance, representing over 130,000 people.
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Expected results
The expected benefits to the well-being of local populations will, on the one hand, stimulate local economic activity and contain rural exodus and, on the other hand, increase the food autonomy of the Senegalese villages through the implementation of economic activities resulting from the planted trees.
Having regained ownership of their forest, the villagers will protect it better and increase its value. On the environmental front, protected zones will make up a barrier against desertification and will contribute to the regulation of the local climate in the short term (3 to 5 years), then to the improvement of world climate in the long term (10 to 15 years).
Discover testimonies from the beneficiaries : 
Read more on : Planting 20 million useful trees
Planting trees that precisely meet the needs of villagers living on the periphery of the forest and in the villages will help to fix and enrich the soils, produce fruit and honey, delimit lands, produce vegetable oil that may be used as clean fuel, increase the number of shady spots, etc.
250,000 trees will be planted within 3 years in every village.
Building 6 central nurseries and supporting an existing network of 60 local nurseries managed by the women will be a start on the way to gathering the necessary production tools for community reforestation intended to be self-sufficient in the long run.
These equipments will be exploited in a sustainable way and the activities linked to each production (fruit processing, apiculture, sorting of gum arabic, etc.) will be reinforced. The villagers in every village will be trained in the management of a forestry site.
A survey of the tree survival rate for each village is made after 1 year, then 3 years, and a collective reward is granted to the village with the highest tree survival rate. This is the system chosen by Trees & Life Senegal to guarantee the planted trees.
The right to have access to agricultural mechanization, until now unavailable to the villagers concerned by the project, the opening of a community granary, or even the funding for a millet mill, motor-pumps and medicines are some of the possible reward systems. In addition, “nature equivalent bonuses” that reward the villager through the supply of hives or materials for guinea-fowl farming are set up as soon as the planting is complete.
This approach has been successfully tested by the Integrated Ecosystem Management Programme of Senegal (PGIES) in Niokolokoba Park since 2002. It enables village populations to take ownership of the trees plantations in the short term AND in a long-term dynamic.
At the end of the project, it is expected that the village populations will have perceived the benefits of tree planting and will spontaneously carry on with the project activities, possibly with a more sporadic assistance from public services. The development of activities in parallel with the plantation project is essential for encouraging this dynamic in a lasting way.
Read more on : Protecting 100,000 hectares of forests through community action
Creating a Community-based Forest consists in:
1/ Giving the forests a legal status
According to a legal procedure established and recognized by the State, the forestry lands are determined and the villagers granted the usufruct right on those forestry lands. This is the lever for re-appropriation of natural resources within the villages. Trees&Life Senegal provides support in creating a Community-based Forest in several steps:
determination of lands through meetings between rural communities;
diagnosis of the zone and delimitation of the forest through cartography, monographs of the concerned villages and forestry inventories;
creation of villagers’ committees who will be entrusted with the forest ownership rights;
drawing up of the sustainable development plan for the forest;
legal procedures in order to obtain ownership rights and the Community-based Forest Status.
2/ Acting on the levers for deforestation
The main levers for deforestation in Senegal are: non-sustainable charcoal production, farming and bushfires (Bellassen et al., 2009). The Trees&Life Senegal programme for the creation of Community-based Forest includes:
poachers training to be eco-wardens in the Community-based Forest;
intensification of community farming, through the acquisition of agricultural machinery, millet mill and motor-pumps;
promotion and diffusion of improved fireplaces leading to reduced wood consumption by at least 30%;
implementation of a programme of fight against bushfires through creation and maintenance of firebreaks in every Community-based Forest;
child awareness-raising campaigns aimed at future generations on the protection of the environment and especially of the forest: awareness-raising campaigns are organized in the 100 schools of the villages involved in the project;
reinforcement of the villagers’ skills through training in order to create economic activities from planted trees and to develop social entrepreneurship;
introduction of sustainable techniques for community carbonization.
3/ Creating and developing sustainable economic activities
For the villagers, forest protection induces a loss of opportunities. In order to compensate this loss of income for the local populations, a network of micro-credit and savings cooperative societies is set up to fund the creation and development of environmentally responsible activities. In order to gain access to micro-credit, the project promoter has to prove that the activity is beneficial to the environment or doesn’t cause environmental degradation. Those cooperative societies will rely on the existing network of the PGIES environmental cooperative societies (9 cooperative societies in 4 Eco-regions in Senegal). A working capital is pumped into the cooperative society when it opens; it will be maintained by the incomes generated by products and services from the planted trees (ie: carbon credit) in subsequent years.
Carbon finance for the carbon sequestered by the trees and the carbon “avoided” through the protective action of existing forests that would have been deforested if the project had not been implemented is applied to the plantation of the 20 million trees and to the protection of the 100,000 hectares of existing forests. Field measurements taken in various characteristic forests in Upper Casamance show that the average carbon content of the forests is nearly 260 tons of CO2 per hectare, among which 74 tons in the air biomass (30%) and 186 tons in the soil (70%).
In every Trees&Life Senegal partner village, nearly 280 tons of CO2 will be sequestered every year thanks to the planting of 250,000 trees.
A virtuous plan for the redistribution of the incomes generated by this carbon finance is being considered with the aim of :
giving a monetary value to one of the environmental services provided by the forest and allowing the local communities who live from the forest, protect it and regenerate it, to enjoy it. A “Trust-type” governance is considered.
allowing Trees&Life Senegal activities to be repeated in other villages and sub-regions via a dedicated part of carbon incomes. A “De-multiplication Funds-type” governance is being considered.
Read more on : Harvesting Rainwater
Climate warming is not exactly the right word to define the current climatic evolution, which is not exclusively expressed by a temperature increase. Climate change seems to be a more appropriate term. For instance, since June 2009, torrential rains have beaten down on much of West Africa, a zone where water is usually rare. Because of the precarious living conditions, town-planning problems and the lack of irrigation channels, the situation has been all the more disastrous, killing a great number of people and causing much technical damage.
In order to break out of the “all or nothing” syndrome with respect to water, one possible solution may be to harvest rainwater, store it, use it throughout the year and inject it into the soil. Because of surface flow and evaporation, water losses are high in most countries of the Sahel. Instead of being used by man or nature (soil), water flows into rivers, then into the sea.
Read more on : Beneficiaries
The 6 rural communities involved in the project are: Saré Coly Salé, Sinthiang Koundara, Linkering, Néma Taba, Wassadou, and Bokonto. The targeted regions are rural zones characterized by slow, even stagnant, development in spite of the significant needs of the country in farm produce. Population is made up of 99% of rural households, among which 70% are considered vulnerable (250 000 FCFA/year). 20% of the population have no access to power, more than 40% experience a shortage of water and more than 84% of children under 5 years of age are anaemic.
