Caravan

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Caravan

Pakistan
Project Stage:
Scaling
Budget: 
$1,000 - $10,000
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Project Summary
Elevator Pitch

Concise Summary: Help us pitch this solution! Provide an explanation within 3-4 short sentences.

Jafar Shah is creating a model for partnerships between local communities, local government, and provincial/regional government to help conserve forests and natural resources at the community level. This gives the communities most dependent on and affected by the state of the forests a critical and prominent role in forest conservation. He developed a successful partnership in Swat and is spreading his idea by training community leaders and local government officials from other parts of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.  

About Project

Solution: What is the proposed solution? Please be specific!

Jafar's community organization, Caravan, mobilizes local people and caters to their needs through self-help and donor-sponsored projects. Caravan focuses on helping people manage their forest and water resources by assisting them in finding alternatives to timber for heating and cooking. Caravan also responds to the health, education, and livelihood needs of the local populations. Jafar has mobilized and organized the tribal people of the mountainous region in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan to create a hierarchy of organizations from the village level to an apex forum with representatives of the villages in four valleys. This apex forum—Kohistan Development Forum(KDF)—is helping provincial and local governments implement forest management and conservation policies through Pakistan's new Joint Forest Management (JFM) directive. The JFM committee, made up of representatives from the community, local government, and relevant provincial government departments, is implementing government policies that were previously shelved because of a lack of cooperation and coordination between the three groups. Having demonstrated the positive effects of the JFM policy in the four valleys (especially by effectively controlling illegal logging), Jafar is attempting to expand JFM policy implementation to other regions. To support this expansion, Caravan is setting up a training center in Swat, and has developed a promotional campaign to influence the policies of the Pakistan government and international donors.
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