Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in African Dry Forests: from local action to national forest policy reforms

The Approach

The initiative focuses of forest enterprise development, and hence, the approach involves targeting communities directly involved in the production and marketing of specific forest products as follows :

• Gum Arabic in the Sahelian part of Burkina Faso and shea nuts in the southern parts of the country ;
• Gums and resins in the dry forests of north-western Ethiopia ;
• Honey and bees wax in the North-Western and the Copperbelt provinces in Zambia.

The action-research involves tracking the production systems, processing technologies, marketing strategies, local and international markets, pricing, policy and institutional arrangements over the resources. Data collected will be used in guiding development options and will also be used to understand how forest-based enterprise can be promoted and how they can be linked to sustainable forest management. A similar methodological approach is applied across the three countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Zambia) to provide a basis for a comparative analysis of how to link local action on forest management to policy and ultimately to improved livelihoods.