The Borana Collaborative Forest Management Project from a Gender Perspective.
Abstract
The Borana Collaborative Forest Management Project (BCFMP) was established by SOS Sahel in 1999/2000. The Project aims to deal with a set of specific problems related to the juniper forests of Borana. The forests are used by settled and semi-settled agro-pastoralist villages for subsistence, income generation and within drought coping strategies, and by pastoralists as a critical source of dry season grazing. However, short-term exploitation of the forest, such as supplying the urban demand for fuel and timber, is not proving sustainable. Underlying these problems are pressures on the rangelands themselves and on traditional Boran pastoralism. War, drought, population pressure and ethnic clashes have combined to threaten traditional pastoralist livelihoods and push them towards a greater reliance on crop production. Many have settled in peri-urban areas and/or around the forests.
So far the Project has not addressed gender issues in any great detail. Gender disaggregated data was collected as part of a stakeholder analysis, however, no further investigations and/or analyses have taken place. It has been proposed however that the Project develops a Gender Strategy as part of the BCFMP Social Studies component, which will focus on gender roles in natural resource management. This will then be used for taking a more gender-oriented approach to the Project and its implementation.
This case study is based upon a visit to the Borana Collaborative Forest Management Project in September 2001. During this visit interviews were carried out with Project staff and women and men in the local communities.
Citation
Flintan, F.; Tapia, E. The Borana Collaborative Forest Management Project from a Gender Perspective. (2002) 9 pp.
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