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Work and Experience, Achievements
In Niger the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families - pastoral herders, farmers and livestock keepers, urban and rural people - depend on the movement of flocks and herds from South to North and back with the alternation of dry and wet seasons. The resources which are the key to this system - wells, seasonal lakes and ponds, grazing pastures, woodlands providing shade and browse, agreed migration routes for livestock keeping them out of fields of crops - all have to be managed and regulated through consensus. Competition is growing; centralised state management has failed; privatisation would aggravate conflict and lead to disaster.
After five years of experiment and negotiation, SOS Sahel accompanied representatives of all the local users of the Takieta Forest in proposing a local committee to manage it and persuaded the Niger Government to grant it the rights to do so.
The process of achieving this new arrangement - the first of its kind in Niger - is providing lessons for scaling up the approach to management of common pool resources across the country.
The programme now focuses on:
The management of sylvo-pastoral
resources currently threatened by expansion of agricultural
lands and an ambiguous legal status.
The management of small scale
plantations planted in the 1970’s and 80’s which have never
been used or managed. SOS Sahel is working with communities,
and the government to overcome technical, legal and social
barriers to local management through negotiation, training
and research.
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