Prospects of community-based forest management in sustaining forest resource base and socio-economies of local communities in Tanzania.
Loading...
Date
2010
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Sokoine University of Agriculture
Abstract
Worldwide. Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) has recently been advocated
as a good approach for reversing the rapid decline of forest resources and improving socio
economies of local communities adjacent to forest reserves. Despite the assumption that
CBFM model improves management of forest resources and maintains the socio
economies of local communities, a wide assessment has not been done in Tanzania. Mgori
Forest Reserve (MFR) where CBFM has been implemented was taken as a case study. A
cross sectional research design was adopted to generate information on sustainance of
forest resource base and socio-economics of local communities. Socio-economic data were
collected using questionnaire survey, focus group discussion and key informant interview.
Forest resource base data were collected using known forest inventory procedures. Both
types of data were analyzed using appropriate data analytical softwares and tools. The
findings indicated that the most important institutions were committees, village
government. District council, tenure and by-laws. It was observed, further that the
effectiveness of existing institutions and dimensions of good governance were ranked
satisfactorily. Household socio-economies for communities adjacent to MFR increased
after CBFM inception. The contribution of sales of forest products to total income of
households was about 18%. Consumption of forest products in households was almost the
same during CBFM and before its inception. All selected livelihood’s assets showed to
have improved after CBFM inception. Significant (p < 0.1) positive relationships between
wealth status of households and institutions and good governance were observed.
Conservation of forest resource base in all the reserves under CBFM has been achieved as
indicated by the stand parameters comparable to the other similar protected reserves.
Further, the diversity indices (79 tree/shrub species, 2.87 Shannon Weiner diversity index
(H'), 0.07 Dominance index C) observed in MFR were equivalent to those observed in other intact forests of the same category. The study, further, showed that there was 18%
reduction of physical damages caused by human activities in the reserves. The study
concludes that the CBFM model introduced in Mgori Forest Reserve is effective as the
socio-economics of local communities had improved and forest resources were well
conserved. The study recommends that more efforts should be put to strengthen and scale
up CBFM in Tanzania
Description
Keywords
Forest resources, Forest management, Socio-economies, Local communities, Tanzania.