Page 38 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

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Coffee demonstration plot, Kalinzi village, Tanzania. JGI, 2018. Sustainable agricultural practices are a key focus of Tacare in rural villages. With alternative income or tree-planting initiatives, a cycle of renewable resource use begins to take shape, reducing the impact from the main threat to biodiversity in the region, that of forest conversion to agriculture.
implement it correctly, there are certain considerations: “If you don’t have enough expertise, for example, you might end up promoting invasive spe- cies in the areas. One of the aspects was to try to help people understand what the best species are for use in the villages.” Sadly, Japhet says, that project also lost funding and could not continue.
Despite these setbacks, he is proud to point to the project’s successes. One such success was in Mwamgongo, where the source of the local watershed is a waterfall. “This waterfall was protected using the conserva- tion approaches, by which I mean the people from the soil and forest con- servation and community development department, they were working together, trying to empower the village committee to come up with some sort of a bylaw. One of the principles in the bylaw was to try to imple- ment a 60-meter farming exclusion area around the waterfall, rather than people farming too close and destroying their water source. That success was the result of Tacare sensitization.”