Browsing by Author "Chingonikaya, E E"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Prospects of community-based forest management in sustaining forest resource base and socio-economies of local communities in Tanzania.
(Sokoine University of Agriculture, 2010) Chingonikaya, E E
Worldwide. Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) has recently been advocated as a good approach for reversing the rapid decline of forest resources and improving socio economies of local communities adjacent to forest reserves. Despite the assumption that CBFM model improves management of forest resources and maintains the socio economies of local communities, a wide assessment has not been done in Tanzania. Mgori Forest Reserve (MFR) where CBFM has been implemented was taken as a case study. A cross sectional research design was adopted to generate information on sustainance of forest resource base and socio-economics of local communities. Socio-economic data were collected using questionnaire survey, focus group discussion and key informant interview. Forest resource base data were collected using known forest inventory procedures. Both types of data were analyzed using appropriate data analytical softwares and tools. The findings indicated that the most important institutions were committees, village government. District council, tenure and by-laws. It was observed, further that the effectiveness of existing institutions and dimensions of good governance were ranked satisfactorily. Household socio-economies for communities adjacent to MFR increased after CBFM inception. The contribution of sales of forest products to total income of households was about 18%. Consumption of forest products in households was almost the same during CBFM and before its inception. All selected livelihood’s assets showed to have improved after CBFM inception. Significant (p < 0.1) positive relationships between wealth status of households and institutions and good governance were observed. Conservation of forest resource base in all the reserves under CBFM has been achieved as indicated by the stand parameters comparable to the other similar protected reserves. Further, the diversity indices (79 tree/shrub species, 2.87 Shannon Weiner diversity index (H'), 0.07 Dominance index C) observed in MFR were equivalent to those observed in other intact forests of the same category. The study, further, showed that there was 18% reduction of physical damages caused by human activities in the reserves. The study concludes that the CBFM model introduced in Mgori Forest Reserve is effective as the socio-economics of local communities had improved and forest resources were well conserved. The study recommends that more efforts should be put to strengthen and scale up CBFM in Tanzania