Farhiyo Ibrahim Hassan NRM committee member
Figure 1: Farhiyo Ibrahim Hassan NRM committee member
Bardale village of Bokolo Kebele is one of the project target areas in Dolo Odo Woreda, in the Ethiopian side. The village epitomizes all what pastoralist communities of the horn of Africa are currently facing. The weather is uncomfortably hot, water is scarce and natural resources is depleted in the village, greatly affecting the lives of the pastoralist communities.
Yunis Abdow Aden and Farhiyo Ibrahim Hassan are Natural Resource Management (NRM) committee members in Bardale village. They witnessed the drastic changes that their community is experiencing these days. According to them, the community has repeatedly facing different natural or man-made catastrophes like flooding, drought, human, animal and crops disease, and these all are the effects of environmental and social pressures.
Figure 2: Yunis Abdow Aden kabele chairman and member of NRM committee
Of particular concern for the community were deforestation, invasion of prosopis, and land degradation. They also mentioned that these problems were exasperated by high population pressure, urbanization and increasing refugee population in the area. “Despite our desire to act up on the problems, we had largely lacked the awareness, the structure and the capacity on NRM works, and thus had to see things going from bad to worse”, they added.
Cognizant of this, BORESHA project has been building the capacity of local communities with the aim of improving natural resource management practice of the community. The support specifically focuses on supporting communities and local governments to improve rangelands, which is the backbone of their livelihood.
Yunis Abdow Aden and Farhiyo Ibrahim Hassan both received training on Natural Resource Management through BORESHA project. Having aimed at reducing the widely prevailing deforestation in the village, the training familiarized them with the concept of natural resource management, and effective natural resource management strategies. As part of this, the training identified traditional NRM methods and integrated it with modern knowledge of NRM.
Witnessing on the changes from the training, Yunis said, they had developed good understanding of NRM and started taking initiatives to protect and manage natural resources such as forest, land, water, and range land. In particular, they claimed that the training and their subsequent action has been preventing charcoal production, and this has reduced the number of charcoal producers in their village.
Indeed, both agree that they are yet to bring back the natural resource that they have lost due to lack of awareness and unwise use of natural resources, not to mention the effects of global climate change. However, a laudable achievement for them is that they have now active NRM committee and a community more conscious about the need for rational utilization of local natural resources and willing to support new natural resource management initiatives. Though they are aware of the long way to go, they are confident that they will reclaim their lost forests and rangelands, and champion better natural resource management practices with support of BORESHA project.