Who
My name is Moses Ogwal from Lango sub region, 29 years of age, male by sex and a langi by tribe. Social worker by profession with strong forestry background from 2011 when I began to coordinate Uganda Forestry Working Group in Lango sub region up to date. Am committed to improve the lives of people with trees and proper use of agricultural landscapes in our region.
I would love to be part of the GCARD3 global event so that my dreams of empowering young people come to a greater reality.
What
This proposed project is premised on restoration of biodiversity within the agricultural landscape of Lango sub region, northern Uganda particularly among the tobacco, sunflower and cotton growing communities. Young farmers are concerned that their commercial agriculture enterprises have adverse impacts on the environment. They also appreciate the need to undertake measures for restoration.
Supporting conservation farming for biodiversity and ecosystem services restoration among small to very small scale commercial farming communities in the proposed project area will be a collaboration between MECPA and the district local government of the selected district. The sub county will be based on their poor environmental performance. MECPA is the main proponent, and has a track record working on thematic areas of forestry and agro forestry for over five years.
Why
Lango sub region have emerging commercial agriculture districts with crops such as tobacco, sunflower, cotton among others taking the toll on destruction of the environment. Firstly, large areas are cleared of trees to pave way for crop production. Secondly, crops such as tobacco, require large volumes of timber in form of biomass energy for curing tobacco. Therefore, they will be encouraged to integrate tree in their farm land.
How
For the selected district, the project will be implemented in one sub-county. The project will target schools and established commercial farmers groups of sunflower, tobacco, cotton and any other category. The project proposes to:
- Establish 5 woodlots, 1 hectare each, at each of the selected beneficiary schools in the proposed project area.
- Establish 10 woodlots, 1 hectare each, for 10 selected beneficiaries in the proposed project area.
- Promote agro-forestry among the selected beneficiary farmers.
- Hold a project inception workshop and dissemination meetings at sub-county level to popularize the project.
For the last 3 years MECPA has managed advocacy and community empowerment projects, successfully implemented and concluded. In 2013 MECPA partnered with the Uganda Forest Working Group Umbrella Program supported by WWF-Uganda to conduct sub national consultation meetings (Lango sub region) on FSC-IGI standard development process for Uganda. From 2014-2015, MECPA partnered with Straight Talk Foundation to implement conservation farming among small scale commercial farmers in middle North with funding support from UNDP/GEF. Currently, Together with ECO-Trust, MECPA is introducing farmers to carbon sequestration and trading of carbon credits.
While we focus our minds on the set targets, there is crucial need to keep track of the performance during implementation. The daily work of the project activities are designed around the end results that we are trying to achieve. This then requires a consistent feed back from the beneficiaries of the services that the project is providing. Farmers will give feedback on the quality of services provided by MECPA team who are always in more close contact with them. Such feedback will be reported weekly by the field officer to MECPA Executive Director and then there after, discussed monthly and appropriate action taken during the monthly Staff meetings.
The project staff in collaboration with youth leaders will conduct activity spot checks to be able to provide the required support suppervision, either technical or logistical to run the activities smoothly. All the weekly information captured by project team will be fed into the monthly reports to YAP.
With advice from the project accountant, the project manager will track and manage the project budget on a daily basis. Some situations may require a budget adjustment of a given budget code in favour of another, in case this occurs, it will be in close consultation with the programming and finance staff of YAP. The project manager and the accountant will work together to submit timely monthly financial reports to YAP where they will be reviewed and advised accordingly. This will guide the project expenditure so that the funds are spent to the causes that benefit the intended target.
Blogpost and picture submitted by Moses Ogwal (Uganda) – mecpauganda[at]yahoo.com
The content, structure and grammar is at the discretion of the author only.
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