Thursday, March 12, 2009

The main purpose of my visit here this time, is to complete a tree inventory from a sample of the communities where we are working here, and to complete a household survey of usage of the improved stoves which we are promoting. As a result, the staff agronomist here, Albert Mwambo and myself are travelling from community to community, meeting with farmers, and taking an inventory of their farms if they give us permission. This also gives Albert and myself a lot of time to talk, and he has shared numerous stories about the work that is going on in general here in the program. The story I would like to share at the moment is about one of the savings and loans groups which has had a group nursery for sometime and with Floresta's help was able to access funds from the Kilimanjaro National Park to start a second nursery. They have also invested their own resources, for example to build the fence that you see in the photo. The group plans to operate the nursery primarily for sale of seedlings and hopefully make a profit. As you can see from the picture, taken today, the nursery only has a few seedlings at the moment, and no one was around to ask, but my guess is that they have to potential to produce between 20-25,000 seedlings at any one time. For those of you "in the know", this is an enterprise of the Kokirie group, Tumaini, of which Bariki Tarimo, the one who bought the truck, is a member.

No comments: