Greetings to everybody. My name is Kalulu Anthony.
I come from a really forsaken and drastically deforested remote part of Uganda, called Buyende district. No single local or international civil society organisation has operated there on a poverty alleviation project in any social sector at least in the last 16 years—since the “Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA)” was there to construct boreholes and schools in 1992.
Now, with the loss of forests, the poor local people are faced with a series of intractable social and environmental challenges, from the degraded soils and escalating long droughts to the decreasing food production—all unheard.
As a native of the area, I frequently feel I possess one of the few opportunities to save this region, as my organisation “Organic Perspectives” is the first grassroots initiative striving to explore potential support networks to launch the very first conservation work in Buyende.
In the neighboring Kamuli district (where Organic Perspectives is headquartered), we have showcased a successful community agroforestry project that has had quick results in transforming the livestock management systems and changing the microclimates of farmlands for smallholding farmers in Buwanume Parish, with support from “Trees for the Future” (USA) since 2008. What we now want is to replicate this in our home district (Buyende) and on a scaled-up scope.
For the period 2010 – 2018, we are developing a three-pronged waste-to-energy; forest conservation and sustainable agriculture project in Buyende. The project is aimed at creating a clean/renewable energy alternative to the current household energy crisis (fuelwood decline); conserving forests (both through fuel-switch and concurrent tree planting) and promoting sustainable agriculture through soil enhancement (systematic agroforestry technologies using fast-growing nitrogen-fixing trees and the application of the biogas residual bio-slurry).
The biogas component has begun to create employment for the income-constrained youths (as masons) and is poised to improve health and household sanitation through reduced indoor pollution and the managed use of dung as feedstock. On the other hand, fuel-switch and reduced deforestation shall help reduce GHG emissions.
With our current team of four masons, we are now working with 13 households that have expressly shown the capacity to meet the full biogas system costs. However, those households that could potentially participate through cost-sharing outnumber those that are able to meet all costs on their own. In this, the project requires multiple support lines for subsides e.g. partnership with the newly launched “Uganda Domestic Biogas Program”, as well as private investment capital (e.g. carbon finance) to meet our goal of reaching out to 20,000 poor households in 4 – 5 years through cost-sharing.
At this moment, however, potential returns on private investment financing (e.g. tradable emission reductions) are not feasible until a number of initial digesters are in place to minimize the payback risks of private investment financing. For this reason, we are initially using a “Miniature Project Approach” aimed at installing a few (about 300) subsidized household biogas systems and five [5] fully-sponsored community-shared digesters per year—to leverage private financing mechanisms for scale-up.
The community-shared digesters (60M3 - 80M3) shall be installed in households having 30 – 100 cattle (common in Buyende) to supply free gas to those households that do not have any cattle, in turn for planting 500 trees by each such household per year. The saplings are to be provided to the farmers by Organic Perspectives at no charge. The rationale for the shared digesters is that all households are equally impacted by the dwindling forests, so they equally need innovation—whether or not they have cattle.
Household digesters (6M3 - 8M3) are being installed at a cost of $300 - $500 and each community-shared digester is estimated to cost $3000. Through our Miniature Project Approach, we would like to ask any potential supporters of our project for a subsidy of only $150 to lower the installation costs of each of the 300 household digesters (totaling to USD4,5000) and $3000 as full costs for each of the 5 community-shared digesters (totaling to USD 15,000)—a total of USD 60,000 on 305 digesters per year. Alternatively, any proportional support (e.g. half this amount) can also enable us to get 150 digesters in place.
If our work interests you further, you might like to help our organisation acquire an updated website to help us in communicating project updates and launching funding appeals. The single webpage we currently have is hosted by a UK partner but we are not able to post project updates on it—the information there were our initial ideas of 2007, yet we have since reshaped our action strategies.
Finally, you might be interested in reading our full Business Plan, or the online articles and photos about the work of Organic Perspectives—taken by staff of Trees for the Future (USA) in their field visits to our ongoing agroforestry project in Kamuli district. I can send these to you for a view of our thrilling work.
Also—not to sound rude—if you cannot do anything, please consider only touring our home district of Buyende, to catch a first hand concrete sight of deforestation and the unfolding energy and environmental constraints in action. As a place at the epicenter of the direst vulnerabilities, your kind visit will help the poor district of Buyende to cast off the decades of absolute unawareness on what really goes on here.
Ideally—as requested above—your prospective support of $60,000 will get in place 305 digesters within one year, and alternatively, just half of this ($30,000) can enable us to install 150 digesters.
We would be grateful to hear from you.
My contact email is organic.uganda@yahoo.com
Kalulu Anthony | Organic Perspectives
P.O Box 16 Kamuli – Uganda.
http://www.gaianlife.co.uk/organicperspectives
