Microforestry: A Solution to Rural Poverty
KOMAZA works to get dry-land farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa out of extreme poverty. In rural areas, which lack the public services or infrastructure of a city, both the causes of and solutions to poverty are intimately tied to the land – rural poverty and deforestation are intricately linked. When farmers don’t have enough money, they can’t afford good nutrition, health-care, or education. They earn what they can by unsustainably cutting down trees to sell as charcoal, further eroding their land and exacerbating their poverty. KOMAZA works to alleviate rural poverty through an environmentally sustainable and economically viable alternative to deforestation. Through our program farmers earn unprecedented income; with this money, families can build better lives.
About You
About You
First Name
Tevis
Last Name
Howard
@KOMAZA
Facebook Profile
About Your Organization
Organization Name
KOMAZA
Organization Website
Organization Phone
650-319-8895
Organization Address
236 West Portal Ave #816, San Francisco, CA 94127
Organization Country
United States, CA, San Francisco County
Country where this project is creating social impact
Kenya, CO
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Microforestry: A Solution to Rural Poverty
What change do you want to bring to the world?
KOMAZA works to get dry-land farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa out of extreme poverty. In rural areas, which lack the public services or infrastructure of a city, both the causes of and solutions to poverty are intimately tied to the land – rural poverty and deforestation are intricately linked. When farmers don’t have enough money, they can’t afford good nutrition, health-care, or education. They earn what they can by unsustainably cutting down trees to sell as charcoal, further eroding their land and exacerbating their poverty. KOMAZA works to alleviate rural poverty through an environmentally sustainable and economically viable alternative to deforestation. Through our program farmers earn unprecedented income; with this money, families can build better lives.
What are the primary activities of your project?
KOMAZA works with rural dry-land families to grow trees as a cash crop through an innovative concept we call “microforestry”. Microforestry is a small-scale forestry program that employs and empowers marginalized farmers to earn substantial income from environmentally-sustainable tree farming. Microforestry is comprised of the following activities:
Land Preparation, Planting & Maintenance Support: In order to receive planting inputs, each farmer attends training sessions and prepares their land according to pre-planting guidelines. KOMAZA then provides families with planting inputs including GC clonal seedlings, water-retaining polymers, fertilizers, and seeds for nitrogen fixing short term crops. With training and support from field staff, each farmer plants their own ¾-acre tree farm (~200 trees). Field staff members provide farmers with regular on-farm and village training throughout the lifetime of their tree farm.
Tree Harvest, Processing & Sale: KOMAZA harvests and sells a portion of trees from each farm multiple times over a 13-15-year harvest cycle, returning periodic income to farmers while letting some trees grow to yield maximum income. Because of a property called coppicing, eucalyptus stumps can re-grow high-quality repeat harvests, providing farmers with decades of continuous income.
Guiding Money into Impact: KOMAZA's relationship with farmers continues long after harvest, as we work with farmers to devise spending strategies for new income and ensure that they can access a range of investment options.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Our program specifically targets the hardest-to-serve farmers living on harsh, semi-arid land. This population is overlooked by other agriculture-based programs that consider dry-land an insurmountable obstacle and work with more accessible communities living on fertile land. To create high-impact social opportunity and environmental intervention, we plant drought-resistant crops and use water-efficient planting practices.
Unlike other distribution programs that supply knowledge without seeds or fertilizers without markets, KOMAZA provides smallholder farmers with access to the complete forestry value chain, eliminating multiple barriers to entry that these farmers previously faced. Once families have their new income, we provide farmers with financial training to invest in new businesses, education, and household improvements. While forestry is our financial and operational backbone, it also serves as the structure through which these communities will be enriched in many more ways.
Our model is based on market principles, and aims to fill Kenya’s large unmet demand for wood products. By working with farmers to grow profitable tree farms we enable complete financial self-sustainability, both for the organization and on a per farmer level. Our goal is to create total life-changing income for farmers, and we aim to increase income 300% or more within the first decade alone. KOMAZA retains costs-plus from the sale of each farmer’s trees to achieve per-farm profitability – at scale, our profitability will enable us to scale to serve millions of dry-land families.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Kenya’s Ganze and Kilifi Districts are home to the nation’s poorest constituencies where 85% of people live below the poverty line and 1 in 3 children is malnourished. 80% of inhabitants depend on agricultural livelihoods and the majority live on arid or semi-arid land that is their only asset and source of employment. All of our partner farmers face extreme poverty and own tracts of underutilized, degraded farmland. Over 80% of our staff is local; these staff members intimately tie KOMAZA to our communities and reinforce our investment in returning income and employment to these communities.
Rainfall in these areas is low and erratic, leading to transient droughts and high levels of food crop failure. Poor agricultural yields have led to extreme poverty and left the area dependent on food aid. Most of the indigenous tree cover has been removed over the past several decades; the community is already beginning to suffer from significant soil erosion, which further threatens food supplies and agricultural livelihoods.
KOMAZA’s program is specifically designed to forge lasting relationships with dry-land communities, and in the future we will continue to target communities living in arid and semi-arid lands. In Kenya alone, this encompasses over 88% of the country’s landmass and 25% of its population - approximately 9 million people living with a high incidence of poverty and a low level of access to basic services.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
I (Tevis Howard) came to Kenya in 2002 to study malaria at a medical research facility in Kilifi. While there, I lived with a Kenyan family, and contrary to my expectations of being a closeted boarder, I was immediately absorbed into their family. I had many great conversations with both husband Kalachu and wife Hamida, and they took me with them on their frequent visits to their parents’ farms. There, Kalachu's father explained to me the recognized value of growing big trees because they could be sold for such an immense profit.
I felt such a connection to the people that I continued to return to Kilifi in the following years. I started traveling to rural communities and met incredibly poor rural farmers who were determined to survive and thrive, despite seemingly impossible odds. They spoke to me about their daily life, telling me of their frustrating inability to purchase the most basic commodities that most of the world takes for granted. Understanding this problem of income, I sought ways to enable these families to change their lives.
This is how it started. In coming to Kenya, I encountered a level of poverty I had never before imagined. When I observed how hard these ultra-poor rural Kenyans worked just to provide their families one small meal a day, I felt compelled to help change their life predicament in a self-sustaining manner. I knew it was important to stimulate economic growth by engaging and employing the community, and by linking this need to the lessons Kalachu and his family had taught me, the seeds for microforestry literally took root.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
Since 2008, KOMAZA has partnered with over 3,000 farmers to plant 678,000 trees in rural Kenya. We currently employ 140 Kenyans and provide them with continued education and development opportunities. We have also returned the equivalent of $20,000 worth of short-term food crops to farmers. In April 2011, we conducted our first-ever harvest and returned more than $5,000 total to 29 farmers for a small portion of their 3-year-old tree farms. This harvest gave us a better understanding of the product market and allowed us to return immediate income to farmers. Also, new shoots have already begun to re-grow from the stumps of the harvested trees, proving that rotating harvests will provide farmers with income in years to come.
Although these numbers are an important measure of our initial success, we are building a foundation for long-term impact assessment through our monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts. We recently completed a baseline survey of a sample of KOMAZA farmers to gather socio-demographic information prior to the onset of their relationship with our organization. In the future we will regularly administer surveys to gather this information, helping us to assess change over time in farmer lifestyle and allowing us modify our program to increase impact.
Ultimately, our success is determined by the ways in which farmers invest their income. 73% of our farmers currently have no savings, and many have little experience managing money. By providing financial training and information access, we will encourage farmers to make sustainable investments in education, new businesses, healthcare, and household improvements that will immeasurably change their lives.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
More than 10,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
By the end of 2012, we plan to work with 10,000 total farmer families and to have planted over 2 million trees. This will complete our first Rural Cell, a term that we developed to describe a self-contained operating unit. Reaching this goal will serve as proof that our delivery model is scalable and that our organization can deliver rapid, high-quality growth.
During this time, we will also be developing our Board of Directors and hiring experienced personnel to staff critical management positions. While we are currently exploring hybrid business models, it is likely that for the next three years KOMAZA will leverage philanthropic funding while building relationships with potential future investors to support our long-term growth prospects.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Some of the key risks we have identified and are working to mitigate are:
Agricultural Risk: Severe/prolonged drought and pests/diseases are a fundamental concern. We mitigate this risk by planting a portfolio of hardy crops, training and supporting farmers in problem identification and early response, and providing farmers with pesticides, water-retaining soil additives, and water storage containers.
Local Staff Capacity Risk: There is limited local capacity to manage the growth and profitability of a rapidly expanding social enterprise. Thus, we provide professional development and training, and recruit skilled managers and consultants to develop sustainable systems. We also work with experienced advisors for valuable legal, financial, and strategic expertise.
Farmer Side-Selling Risk: A typical tree maturation cycle is a long time to wait, and farmers could harvest their trees early or sell elsewhere. We are confident that this will not happen, as KOMAZA builds firm, long-standing relationships with farmers through frequent interaction. Through regular meetings and training, farmers understand that they are making a long-term investment and substantially benefit by waiting to harvest trees.
Funding Risk: Inability to reach fundraising targets would delay our ability to achieve per-farm profitability. Thus, we strategically pursue funding opportunities from diverse sources, and we expect to transition to debt/equity financing in the medium term. We will also reinvest the earnings of each farm to enable self-scaling expansion at the micro-level and sustainability into the future.
Tell us about your partnerships
KOMAZA has developed a diverse network of professional, government, academic and non-profit partners, both in Kenya and abroad. Locally, major partnerships include:
• Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI): Assists with field experiments on pests and diseases
• Kenya Forestry Service (KFS): Provides government support, technical assistance, and knowledge sharing
• Kenya Ministry of Agriculture: Collaborates on soil conservation and resource management strategies
• National Environmental Management Authority (Kenya): Evaluates KOMAZA’s environmental impact
In addition to collaborating with organizations in the field, we also seek to identify partners who can support the overall growth and strategic direction of KOMAZA. For example, Princeton in Africa and Humanity Exchange have connected us with highly skilled staff, and lawyers from Morrison & Foerster LLP regularly provide pro-bono assistance. Similarly, the Draper Richards Foundation has conducted rigorous due diligence on KOMAZA through its own research and by reviewing our business plan, financial information, references and past project milestones.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
More than $1 million
Explain your selections
KOMAZA has a strong record of attracting philanthropic funding, and to date we have been supported by selective foundations including the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, the Mulago Foundation, the Peery Foundation, and Jasmine Social Investments. Our funding typically comes from the following sources:
Large Foundations: We are currently supported by four prestigious social venture foundations, each providing $100k+ of unrestricted funding on a yearly basis. We expect that our funding growth will come primarily from working with new foundations giving $100-500k a year.
Small-Medium Foundations: We are pursuing project-specific grants from foundations that give $10-100k annually. Additionally, we are in ongoing talks with several family foundations about Program Related Investments in revenue-generating activities. These funds would be repaid from proceeds of the project.
High Net Worth Individuals: Through attending conferences and other networking activities, we continue to form relationships with individuals who see the unique opportunity to help launch a world-class social enterprise and encourage their investment, engagement and advising.
Small-Scale Donors: A Peery Foundation grant has allowed us to invest in increased multimedia capabilities, and we are leveraging this new content to increase our small donor base.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
The microforestry project will be strengthened by our current efforts to build KOMAZA’s organizational capacity and to test the later stages of wood product production. Our plans include:
• Build Executive Team: We are recruiting experienced and capable executives willing to commit to multiple year contracts to help oversee our growth. In the near and medium-term, we expect to hire a COO, a Director of US Operations, and several other additions to our management team.
• Conduct Mobile Sawyers Pilot – We are working to launch a proof-of-concept in Western Kenya that will fell mature trees and sell them as lumber, proving that once our farmers have mature trees we can cut them down, process them, and sell the end product to generate life-changing income for our families.
• Open Ganze Office – In order to complete our first Rural Cell, KOMAZA needs a rural office to oversee and provide centralized feedback concerning day-to-day operations. We have purchased land for the office and are in the process of designing and building the office.
• Open KOMAZA Nursery – KOMAZA has reached a stage in our growth where semi-annual plantings require more seedlings than can be easily locally sourced. To meet this need, we are in the early phases of constructing a large-scale nursery. In time, we plan to self-source 100% of our seedlings.
Challenges
Which barriers to employment does your innovation address?
Please select up to three in order of relevancy to your project.
PRIMARY
Lack of visibility and investment
SECONDARY
Lack of access to information and networks
TERTIARY
Lack of skills/training
Please describe how your innovation specifically tackles the barriers listed above.
1. By definition, microforestry is a large, front-loaded investment of agricultural inputs and training, designed to address previously overlooked issues of dry-land farming and enhance farmers’ ability to generate income.
2. Once trees are harvested, KOMAZA provides farmer partners with access to processing technologies and markets that were previously out of their reach and that will maximize both their product yields and financial returns.
3. Throughout their long-term involvement in KOMAZA’s program, farmers continually interact with well-trained members of our field extension network. Farmers benefit from trainings and demonstrations, planting and maintenance education, and staff members’ additional farming skills and expertise.
Are you trying to scale your organization or initiative?
If yes, please check up to three potential pathways in order of relevancy to you.
PRIMARY
Grown geographic reach: Within host country
SECONDARY
Other (please specify below)
TERTIARY
Enhanced existing impact through addition of complementary services
Please describe which of your growth activities are current or planned for the immediate future.
1. Our primary near-term goal is to expand our partnerships to 10,000 farmers. This would complete our first Rural Cell and confirm our operating model, priming the organization for additional expansion.
2. To support this growth, we are working to enhance our existing services for farmers by experimenting with new tree species and medium-term crops. Medium-term crops provide farmers with steady income, while in the long-term, planting a variety of tree species enhances the biodiversity of our farmers' land and increases KOMAZA's market value.
3. Finally, we are building capacity around the delivery side of our model, using the lessons learned from our initial small-scale harvest this year to develop efficient harvesting and processing infrastructure for future large-scale harvests.
Do you collaborate with any of the following: (Check all that apply)
Government, Technology providers, NGOs/Nonprofits, For profit companies, Academia/universities.
If yes, how have these collaborations helped your innovation to succeed?
We collaborate with Kenyan agricultural and forestry agencies to receive government support, information sharing, and assistance in building our local network.
We have worked informally with other local nonprofits in coastal Kenya, and have received notable support from One Acre Fund with regards to infrastructure and scaling support, and advice on best practices.
Many for-profit companies and technology providers have provided us with wide-ranging support, from pro-bono legal services through Morrison & Foerster LLP to GIS mapping data assistance through Geodyssey.
Working with academia and universities, we have found both incredibly skilled staff and board members who continue to support and inform our work.
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| Jatropha seed.jpg | 146.39 KB |
| Tree seedlings.jpg | 236 KB |
| Trees.jpg | 353.43 KB |
| Experimental Farm.jpg | 253.98 KB |
| Dryland.jpg | 173.82 KB |
| Children playing checkers.jpg | 199.4 KB |
| Local market.jpg | 327.57 KB |
| Farmer on planting day.jpg | 175.52 KB |
| Farmer on her shamba.jpg | 228.83 KB |
| Farmer Josephine's school.jpg | 221.49 KB |
| Planting.jpg | 333.83 KB |
| Farmer with her seedlings.jpg | 214.11 KB |
 | 49 weeks agoTevis Howard updated this Competition Entry. |
| 50 weeks agoTevis Howard updated this Competition Entry. |
| 52 weeks agoTevis Howard updated this Competition Entry. |
| 54 weeks agoTevis Howard updated this Competition Entry. |
| 54 weeks agoTevis Howard submitted this idea. |
