Sustainable management of the Ekuri Forest by the Ekuri Community

The project aims to strengthen the Ekuri Initiative in her exploitation of the timber resources of the Ekuri community forest (50 of 33,600 hectare) in a sustainable and community-managed manner. The project will: * Improve transport and marketing of timber from the community forest by replacement of the office from Calabar to Ekuri (distance 200 km). The location of the office at Calabar causes high transport costs for timber, while the community has insufficient influence over this office. Two small trucks will replace the old truck and new chainsaws will be bought to improve the quality of the timber. * Build the organisational capacity of the Ekuri Initiative with the aim of developing greater community accountability of the funds from forest exploitation. * Improve the skills of the Ekuri Initiative for forest management planning. This will stimulate low impact harvesting of timber and NTFPs (afang and bush mango) and allows forests to regenerate naturally.

This project was implemented successfully. The establishment of one office in the Old Ekuri and one in the New Ekuri village was facilitated; with these offices the Ekuri Initiative aims to guaranty transparency for the villages on the use of the Ekuri Community forest. The sawmill has improved the milling of timber and therefore created more income for the villages. The micro-credit scheme led to a further increase in income as a result of the diversification of other income generating activities. This has raised the standard of living of the people, as did the reduction of detrimental forest activities which has led to increased availability of NFTPs.