Sustainable Management of the Ekuri Forests by the Ekuri Community, Nigeria
Duration of project:
| Three years starting October 2000 |
| Ekuri Initiative |
Project Summary:
This project will provide training and management support to the villages of Old Ekuri and New Ekuri who are managing their forest in order to improve their lives and to ensure its long-term survival.
The Ekuri community is made up of Old Ekuri and New Ekuri, two villages 6 km apart located in the buffer zone of Cross River National Park. This Park is found in Southeast Nigeria on the border with Cameroon. The villages (with a population of about 6,000) have been engaged in a community forestry project since 1992 to sustainably harvest timber, vegetables, rattans, and other products from their community forest in a sustainable manner. The villages jointly possess 33,000 ha of tropical forest on their communal land - probably the largest communally controlled forest remaining in Nigeria.
Until 1989, members of both villages had a four-hour walk to the nearest motorable road. No one in the village owned a vehicle, which meant that all the products harvested from the forest was carried to the road and then sold to middlemen for ridiculously low prices. Prior to this, both villages separately tried to make agreements with logging companies - in effect swapping their forest for a road. However in every case, the other village vetoed the agreement because they felt that the benefits from the agreements were too meagre. Then in 1990, when Cross River National Park was created, the villagers approached the park authorities for assistance with constructing a road. The villages realised that if they had a proper road, they could take large quantities of forest products directly to markets in nearby cities and could sell them for much better prices than those obtained at the roadside.
The park sent a community forester to live with them for a year to find out how best the park could provide support. As a result, the villagers decided to work together to manage their forest themselves in order to generate revenue that they would use to construct the road. They also decided that they would like to manage their forests sustainably so that the forests could continue to support projects to address many of their other needs. These included better houses, a better school, a new health centre and even a vehicle to take the villagers to a from the market. With the community forester, worked out a detailed plan identifying what activities they could do themselves and what activities would require external funds and training.
Since then they have received forest inventory training and surveyed a 50 ha plot of forest from which they are harvesting timber. They have been able to pay for a 30-km road to be constructed all the way to both villages, doing much of the preparation work on the road construction themselves. This in turn has made marketing of forest products easier bring in a more regular income to individual households. They have registered an NGO called the Ekuri Initiative and have received considerable support from the Ford Foundation and the Cross River State Forestry Department. This has enabled them to establish an office, demarcate the boundaries of their community land, produce a more detailed 5-year plan, and also a preliminary land-use plan for the entire area of their communal land.
Though these are spectacular successes, the project is still in the early stages of development. Following the completion of the road in 1998, the villages still face some formidable challenges. In order to bring the benefits from forest management directly to individual households.
The project will assist the Ekuri villages so that they can implement the land use plan that will help them to demarcate permanent areas of their land for conservation, forestry, and agriculture. They will also receive assistance with skills training and equipment to develop sustainable forest management plans, and carry out low-impact harvesting of timber and non-timber products from the forest in a manner that allows to forest to regenerate naturally. Other training will focus marketing of these forest products and developing a rural credit scheme for other small-scale household businesses in the villages.
The Ekuri community is unique within Nigeria and the rest of West Africa as the pre-eminent community forestry project in the region with some of the finest intact forest to be found anywhere in the world. The successes of the Ekuri Initiative have already started to inspire other village communities in Nigeria, neighbouring Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa. It is hoped that by providing support to this remarkable project, it will become even more inspirational to many more communities across Africa as a model for development that allows communities to benefit from the conservation and management of their rich forests.
The Ekuri Initiative was founded in 1992 as a co-operative and was later registered as an NGO in 1996. It was founded to achieve two main goals - the conservation a sustainable management of the jointly owned Ekuri community forest and the alleviation of poverty in the Ekuri community through rural development. It is run by the Chief Executive - Oliver Enuor with a board of trustees from Old and New Ekuri. It has 10 staff some of which are based in the village and other in a support office in Calabar.
