As we have just published the final reports of the ECDD project, the Project Coordinator, now Technical Director of the NGO Dahari, reflects on the six years spent in the Comoros.
I feel like it was a different time when I arrived in Anjouan in October 2007 to establish the pilot phase of the ECDD project. I spent three months in the Comoros in 2005 where I managed a student project whose objective was to research the causes and consequences of deforestation, and with which, subsequently, I provided much effort to establish a support network and partnerships that would turn the idea of a long-term intervention into reality. My arrival then represented the beginning of something new and the culmination of much effort.
I have fond memories of those early days when everything was new, I had the opportunity to spend a lot more time in the field, and there wasn't the pressure of a big budget and a big team. and a large-scale program to manage. We started work in the first village, Kowé, in January 2008. Badrou and Siti were with me at that time, and since then, they have both had children who have already grown tremendously! We spent at least two nights a week in the village, sharing mattresses with those who were generous enough to accommodate us. And during the day, we discussed the life and environmental problems that the villagers were facing, and prepared our first intervention, the creation of a market garden for the community.
Gradually, the team grew as we expanded the operation to our second village, Nindri, and recruited agricultural experts to manage our livelihood interventions. Moustoifa was one of those early recruits who is still with us today, playing the role of the wise old man of the team, as well as Misbahou, who became our local coordinator and is now in the UK on a fellowship funded by the Darwin Initiative. The growth of our catchment area and activities continued, and by 2010 the team comprised 20 people and the annual budget of £40 had exceeded £000.
Our work on the ground has also undergone a transformation since the early days. Although the community market garden generated a lot of money, a large proportion did not go where it was intended. Our participatory analyzes were too long, and did not provide us with all the details necessary to design appropriate interventions. It has been a long process of trial and error, and learning from our partners in the Comoros and in the region, especially in Madagascar.
We are now rightly proud of our impact on livelihoods and agriculture in rural communities in Comoros: more than 1800 farmers have received the support needed to improve their incomes in a sustainable way, making around 10 direct beneficiaries including their families, and innovations introduced by the ECDD project are today reproduced by our partners in the Comoros and integrated into agricultural policy. We also provided the forest maps and species distribution models produced by the ecological team – all unique to the Comoros – to the authorities, so that they could be integrated into national conservation programs and the creation of protected areas. . Our work on the collective management of natural resources was also innovative for the Comoros, with the development of a model of collective work carried out with a volunteer workforce. I was particularly delighted when we managed to learn from our early mistakes in Kuwé, to help villagers replace their old water distribution system to transform water availability for the entire village. Another notable moment for me was the effect produced by the film Hadisi ya Ishmael, carried out at the end of 2012 and based on what we had learned throughout the Project, to attract more farmers to our activities and convince them to adopt sustainable agricultural techniques. The film created a buzz in the villages where we were operating and won second place at the inaugural international film festival in the Comoros.
We had our ups and downs before we achieved these successes – working in Comoros was more challenging than I could have ever imagined. The large number of failed interventions demonstrates the challenge of working in the Comoros and is one of the reasons why it took us so long to gain trust in the villages. The lack of social cohesion and respected power structures has made the work delicate, especially efforts regarding collective management, and the isolation experienced in the Comoros has produced many challenges. I am very grateful for the commitment of the team members throughout the project, who did not give up despite the difficulties. This commitment and their skills are clearly visible to everyone who meets them, which never fails to make me proud.
The culmination of ECDD is, of course, the creation of the new NGO Dahari, which is now nearing the end of its first year of existence. We spent a lot of time and attention developing Dahari, and I think this is perhaps the only part of the work where I don't see how we could have really improved the process we followed. We have an excellent group of members who have elected an engaged and competent Board of Directors. Several members of the ECDD team who benefited from all the training during the years of the project, became employees of the NGO, although we also took the opportunity to introduce new faces. And the NGO was launched with already strong integration in its initial area of intervention, and with financial and technical partnerships already organized in the Comoros, in the region and internationally.
The challenge for Dahari on the ground is the integration of protection measures for habitat and biodiversity into the landscape management model – which we are trying to do through the adoption of a payment for services system environmental – while developing a monitoring-evaluation system and continuing to improve agricultural support. And institutionally, the key will be to gradually improve the functioning of the NGO to make it more and more independent of external support, and to continue to establish its reputation in the country and in the region. I am convinced that the necessary foundations have already been laid for Dahari to achieve large-scale change in Comoros in the future, and I intend to accompany Dahari during these first years of existence to solidify these foundations.
So it remains for me to thank all those who contributed to the success of ECDD and who made the creation of Dahari possible. On behalf of the team I want to thank everyone, from the beneficiaries who were patient with us while we learned, to the advisors and local and international partners who did not give up on us during difficult times. I hope they are as proud as we are of the role they played in ECDD, and that they are just as excited as we are about Dahari's future successes.