Nigel Sizer, Rare VP, Asia Pacific, reports on Rare Pride in East Java.

The company Lapindo has a very hot and sticky public relations problem. Probably as a result of its gas exploration drilling south of East Java’s capital, Surabaya, millions of tons of subterranean mud started to ooze out of the ground. That was several months ago, and it hasn’t stopped. Thousands of people have had to leave their homes, never to return, and the firm is spending millions trying to contain the goop. It also destroyed a stretch of highway, making the already congested, smoggy drive from Surabaya to Malang a four-hour nightmare of truck fumes and potholes. We slowly trundled through the ghost towns left in the wake of the disaster as the car’s AC overheated and broke down.

The home of the founder of Kaliandra.    

We were on our way to Malang, and from there 1,500 meters up Mount Arjuna and into the Tahura Forest Reserve, site of one of five Pride campaigns Rare is managing together with the Environmental Services Program, funded by the US Agency for International Development. The campaign is led by Agus Wiyono, who works with a well established local group called Kaliandra, which has been active in the area for several years promoting organic farming, reforestation, and conservation.

Rare’s partner, Kaliandra, is definitely not a typical Indonesian environmental group, and I was curious to see their ecocenter high up on Mount Arjuna. Unlike almost all other local groups here it is not leading a hand-to-mouth existence as grants come and go. It was founded and continues to be supported by two wealthy Indonesians. One, an architect, bought the 35 acres of beautiful mountainside forest that has become Kaliandra’s impressive training center. He also bought an extraordinary home – a grand Georgian mansion, fine enough to make the wealthiest English duke proud.

The generosity of the founders has spawned an NGO that now employs 45 people, mostly from the local community, with a number of flourishing small businesses emerging. With technology from the local university, they make hundreds of pounds of dried fruit chips from pineapple, bananas and – my favorite – jack fruit. This absorbs the excess production from the local agroforestry program, which Kaliandra is also promoting. This in turn helps to create jobs so that the community depends less and less on exploitation of the remaining natural forests higher up the mountain.

Kaliandra is a wonderful success story. Rare is proud to have them as a partner and share with them our experience to build even wider community support for their conservation efforts.

This is Paul Butler’s third post on his trip to Mali.

While in Mali, Dale and I were itching to see KickStart’s Super-MoneyMaker treadle pump in action. We had seen one in the corner of their San Francisco office and had heard about it from several trusted sources, including Kevin Starr at Mulago Foundation.

KickStart is an impressive group and about the same size as Rare. Like our own organization, it too is a multi-year winner of Fast Company’s Social Capitalist Award. KickStart’s forte is selling inexpensive technologies, such as irrigation pumps and hay balers, to farmers in poor communities in sub-Saharan Africa who want to start, or improve, their own small-scale businesses. Their biggest seller is the Super-MoneyMaker foot-driven treadle pump, which raises (on average) a farm’s income from $110 to $1,100 annually.

Treadle pumps have several advantages over motorized pumps for irrigating small plots of agricultural land. First, they are considerably less expensive to purchase than motorized pumps, and secondly they cost much less to operate — having no fuel and only limited repair and maintenance costs. Treadle pumps utilize a person’s body weight and leg muscles in an easy walking motion, such that usage can be sustained for extended periods of time without tiring. The treadle pump is also much less exhausting to use than other manual pumps which are “powered” by a person’s upper body and relatively weak arm muscles.

(more…)

Brett Jenks talked with two graduates of the Rare nature guide training course and shares their experiences.

Two graduates of the first course, Pancho Mayoral and Maldo Fisher, shared their stories with us. Pancho had been a young fisherman and hadn’t finished high school when he entered Rare’s program 10 years ago. He was a turtle poacher in the off-season, knowingly breaking the law in order to generate income for his family. Today, he has his own sea kayaking business and runs intensive trips for the National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS. He hasn’t poached a turtle since 1995.

Pancho Mayoral, left, with Brett Jenks

Maldo was a fisherman and a boat driver for a new, expat-run whale watching operation in 1995. Today, Maldo runs his own business from the shores of San Ignacio. He has 10 cabanas on the beach, solar and wind power, and a central dining palapa that serves fantastic seafood and very cold beer. When Maldo joined the program 10 years ago, he made on average about $200-$300 per month as a boat driver during the whale watching season. This year, he expects 600 mostly North American visitors will let him gross nearly $200,000 in just three months from his own whale watching camp. Maldo also offers greatly reduced packages for school groups from Baja to ensure that Mexican children can also be inspired by the world’s largest mammalian migration.

Together, they described the role that local communities played in the international effort to stop the expansion of Mitsubishi’s Salt Works in the Lagoon. NRDC and IFAW and Grupo de Los Cien ran an international campaign to help stop the Salt Works, but it was the local fishermen and whale watching guides, entrepreneurs in search of a sustainable economy in ecotourism, that legitimized the campaign and gave credence to a homegrown vision of sustainable development. So, for about $200,000 in training and technical assistance, we leveraged a financial ROI that more than justifies the investment, not to mention a conservation constituency that’s already helped “save” the place once and will surely be there as long as the whales are.

These are just 2 of the 20 trained in El Vizcaíno, and just 2 of the 56 trained in Baja California, and just 2 of the more than 300 trained in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and South Africa in the past 10 years. I’ve asked our staff to invest in a more thorough and objective assessment of the ROI and will report back again sometime soon. But the point is: We need to make sure we don’t let the complexity and challenge of measuring conservation success get in the way of actually achieving it.

Rare President and CEO Brett Jenks talks about a recent board trip to Baja California, Mexico. This is the first of two posts.

We recently returned from a Rare board of directors meeting in Loreto, Baja California, where we visited a new pilot project called Fisheries Fellows. Rare is training and mentoring six Mexican fellows, each of whom will spend two years working with fishing cooperatives in six different towns on the Gulf of California. We designed the program with Packard Foundation with several goals in mind: 1) sustainable benthic fisheries; 2) future fisheries leaders; and 3) a model for ramping up the human resource pool for fisheries in Mexico. Huge challenges of course.

We spent our first day in Baja visiting a sea cucumber fishery with some local cooperative members and a few of the fellows. Great way to get the board more hands-on experience with a fishery and a great way to add context to the many serious concerns that come up when we consider new programs: how to measure success in the short term (sustainability plans are feasible, but we’ll need to monitor the actual fishery for much longer to know that we’ve had an impact), what constitutes success (one out of six, six out of six), potential demand for and scalability of this model if it works out, etc.

The second day we flew over El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve to San Ignacio Lagoon to go whale watching and to meet some past graduates of our nature guide training programs there. At the time we started training bilingual local nature guides, 10 years ago, we struggled with the same questions we are now faced with in the Fisheries Fellows program. We wonder: Would guides get jobs? Would they start careers in ecotourism? Would they be able to compete? If they did, how many people could they employ? Would a burgeoning ecotourism economy create a culture of conservation? Was a $10,000 investment in training one guide justifiable? What would be the conservation ROI?

What we saw in San Ignacio was wholly inspiring. Sixteen of the twenty graduates of Rare’s guide training programs in the biosphere reserve are still guiding. Many are managing their own businesses. Many are involved with international and local conservation NGOs. They are community leaders. They teach environmental education in local schools. One has produced a widely used bird checklist for the reserve. Another is an expert kayak guide leader and NOLS instructor.

This is Paul Butler’s second report from Mali. A third report will be posted soon.

It is hard not to love a land where every conversation begins with “Is your family healthy? How is your mother, your father, your wife and children?” and continues by asking about peace. But that does not make it an easy place to live.

For Mali is a land of contrasts, full of warm-hearted people eking out a living under the most difficult conditions. Poverty is widespread. While per capita annual income is $380, making it the 20th poorest country on Earth, the latest United Nations Human Development Report (released in 2003) ranks Mali as the 184th worst country in the world (out of 187 to be living in)—in terms of its annual per capita income, mean education level (fourth grade), average lifespan (49), and infant mortality rate (119 out of 1000 live births).

The challenges facing Mali are enormous. One underlying problem for much of the population is the prolonged annual dry season, which lasts seven to eight months, from November and May. Since 1968, the country has been experiencing a lengthy and devastating drought. Precipitation has dropped 30 percent, while at the same time Mali’s population has exploded.

(more…)

This is Nigel Sizer’s third and last post from Indonesia.

Jakarta: Day 6, February 6, 2007

Jakarta is a city on the point of collapse. Two days of torrential rain last week resulted in the worst floods people can remember. Today, three days later, half the city is still under water. The poor have migrated to mosques, houses of relatives on higher ground, schools and wherever they can find food and shelter. The wealthy have packed the hotels. Local media present a nonstop screed against the politicians and government agencies that they accuse of doing too little and too late. The floods come every year. The drains are not maintained, and more and more buildings and parking lots occupy the few remaining green spaces in and around the city that can help absorb the rains.

But Rare’s work goes on! I flew into Jakarta last night to be able to get into the city in time for a pivotal meeting with our partner, WWF-Indonesia, and their team of managers from Kalimantan, who lead the high-profile Heart of Borneo initiative. Sari and I presented Rare and our methods, while Hari got stuck in flood water somewhere south of Jakarta. Half the city’s roads are impassable, the other half jammed with traffic finding alternative routes.

Despite the logistical challenges, Rare and WWF agreed to form a partnership for Borneo. Now the fun part starts: identifying the local partners to lead the Pride campaigns, raising the funds, and getting out into the forests and local communities to inspire and conserve!

Nigel Sizer’s second report on his trip to learn about a Rare Pride campaign in central Java.

Day 3, January 31, 2007

Sukomakmur Village perches precariously half way up Sumber Volcano’s fertile slopes, 1600 meters above sea level, the highest village in our campaign site. Despite the dramatic contours, steep slopes, often driving rain and wind, the Javanese villages have carved out terraces as far up the mountain as we can see, clearing rich primary forest in the process. Forest now remains only on the uppermost reaches of the mountain, out of sight in the clouds.

Harto, head of a local forest management committee 

Life is tough up here. A lot of the men and some of the women have become migrant workers, heading off to the cities to get low-paid work. Many of the heads of households are now women. They have to work the fields, take care of the children, and most dramatically, scramble up the mountainside several times a week to gather firewood from the forest. There’s no other source of energy for the poor.

Until now, gathering firewood, or even going into the forest, has been illegal because it has protected status. But that’s all about to change. The Pride campaign that Panji is finalizing will include helping the community complete an agreement to manage the forest together with the state-owned forestry firm Perum Perhutani. On the least productive upper terraces, close to the forest, villagers will plant thousands of trees and the forest area will expend. This will help reduce erosion, protect water supplies, provide firewood, and increase habitat for some of Indonesia’s rarest species, including the Javan hawk-eagle, the national bird, and mascot for Panji’s campaign.

(more…)

Nigel Sizer, Rare VP, Asia Pacific, gets a taste of Rare Pride in Indonesia.

Central Java: Day 1, January 29, 2007

It’s hot, and Panji Anom has pharyngitis so the AC is off as we sweat through his project plan presentation. Since I joined Rare three months ago, this is my first experience of seeing Rare Pride in action on the ground (my traveling having been curtailed by the birth of baby Jasper in December). Panji is a Rare Pride campaign manager, with local partner NGO Masta. Panji made a great presentation to our partners at their offices in Jogjakarta—the USAID-funded Environmental Services Program—so I can’t wait to see him in action when he’s 100 percent.

A meeting with GPL Hijau at their reclaimed office.

We’re all tired, but colleague Hari has had the longest day. He was up at 2 a.m. to take the bus to the Jakarta airport to get the first flight here. Sari was up at 3.30 a.m. to get her flight, and I was up all night with 6-week-old Jasper…

Hari Kushardanto and Ni Putu Sarilani Wirawan (Rare’s Indonesia course managers), Panji and I topped off the first day with a leisurely dinner of classic Javanese food. Tofu and tempe cooked in a myriad of styles, rice, egg, chicken, and ubiquitous sambal (very hot chili-based sauce). But my favorite was Es Asam Gulo Jowo, sweet tamarind juice, but try saying the name quickly after a 16-hour workday!

Central Java: Day 2, January 30, 2007

Rare may “inspire conservation” but Sari and I were inspired today by the commitment, dedication, and personal sacrifice of the local environmental NGOs we met with. Each of them operates on a shoestring budget, is half-staffed by volunteers, and somehow manages to sustain field programs year after year. 

One of the groups, GPL Hijau, has built a wonderful small office, with a garden full of flowers and butterflies in the grounds of an abandoned art school. It was the best office we saw today, and they pay no rent. They fund conservation programs for local public schools from the fees earned taking kids from rich private schools out on nature trips.

(more…)