Q &A with Kemba Jaramogi

Technical Director of FACRP and daughter of co-founder Akilah Jaramogi, Kemba Jaramogi, works tirelessly with the Organisation in their year-round environmental initiatives.

“Consistency has been one of our biggest things since being founded in 1982,” Kemba says proudly of the NGO’s long-running success. “Next year we’ll be celebrating 35 years so we’re hoping we can enter 2017 on a really good note.” Known for their efforts in curbing forest fires in the Western Northern Range, FACRP also participates in several partnerships to spread awareness of environmental conscientiousness and upkeep and offers eco-system and social enterprise services to help sustain their NGO financially.

A true community project, FACRP employs several persons within the Fondes Amandes community, along with countless volunteers, who keep the NGO’s vision of a healthy agro-forestry environment while providing sustainable livelihoods with expressions of multicultural traditions alive.

“Sustainability isn’t just about your efforts and what you do out in the field,” Kemba says, adding that sustainable livelihoods must transcend political policy. “It really takes everyone’s effort … to be a collective development in TT.

This is something that I hold dear.” Today, Kemba chats with WMN about the future of FACRP, some of the Organisation’s ongoing partnerships in hopes of spreading environmental awareness, and the reasons she believes communities have the power to control their physical environments.

What has 2016 been like thus far for FACRP? What projects have you undertaken? 2016 has been pretty hectic at Fondes Amandes. The first initiative that we’ve had is the Dry Season Gayap, which is to deal with forest fire prevention and suppression. It’s more or less open to the public on the first three days. The first day is when we usually have a lot of schools participate, it’s usually on a Friday in the middle of March and on the weekend is where we have community members and people from the general public come and participate in learning about forest fire prevention.

Our second main event for the year is World Environment Day where we also invite people to come learn about tree planting and about the changeover from the dry season to the rainy season. We recently concluded our ecoculture camp in August, which focused on climate change adaptation.

One of the projects that came out of the dry season in looking at the fires, we decided to do a public survey via Facebook to collect the feelings of the general public to see how the forest fire season really affects the people of TT.

The responses from the survey really aired the feelings of the general population at that time. A lot of people felt like not enough was being done in the country to address the issues of forest fires. They also thought that laws should be enforced in forest fire prevention and suppression.

We mainly focus on the western part of the Northern Range because that’s the area we have experience with. It’s been very challenging for us with our staff to see a forest fire fighter passing away in a _ re so the survey was really for us to capture the feelings of what was happening at that time and the forest _ re survey did draw some attention from the Ministry of Environment.

Following that we had talks with the Minister and how to partner with Forestry Division to come up with a pilot plan to address some of the concerns that came out of the survey and try to do something different in curbing the forest _ re situation.

Why is “community” an important aspect in bringing about environmental awareness – what is the strength of “community”? The community is a big part of it for us at FACRP because a lot of the times there are meetings, workshops, seminars, and forums - all of these things are held without community participation and usually these things fall apart. Now, if there is the community awareness of the negative impacts of certain environmental practices within their community or region, then they can become custodians of their own environment. In Fondes Amandes we have our NGO but when the _ re season starts, people are on edge, they look out, they do patrols – you don’t even have to ask the young men in the community; from the time they see a fire they drop everything they’re doing and go to help out.

What sort of eco-system and social enterprise services does FACRP offer? We offer different services as part of our eco-system services within our social enterprise framework with the aim to generate income to help us cover the cost of running our NGO. Very often it’s difficult to simply write to a donor to ask for funds to pay for an electricity bill, security, whatever funds we may incur – these things are usually outside of the framework of general funding. So generating income in providing eco-system services is something we hold dear to us. It’s also a form of creating extra employment for staff in the community, so when government partnerships and salary issues arise, this is still a form of back up for community empowerment.

In terms of the services, there are different types of ecotours: one where you go for a hike up the mountain and have a scenic view, a nice workout. Another would be a river hike where you go to the river and enjoy the pool.

Another would be actual sessions, like an herb bread session where you walk and pick the herbs and cut it up and make bread, very similar to the tea session where you pick your herbs and make a tea and can sample four or _ ve different herbs. There are a lot of different and fun ways to package it; sometimes we have special requests from people who are enquiring about doing corporate packages for their staff where you can relax in the hillside and retreat as well.

Are there plans to expand on these services in the future? There are plans indeed. Very often organisations are asked how are they going to sustain funding for future initiatives. It’s very challenging to cover a NGO’s costs so if we can develop ways to generate income and to cover basic operational costs, then we’re having a really huge success. Last year alone we were able to raise a fairly good amount of funds by doing eco-tours and this has helped us to cover some of our bills when funding was low.

Your Centre is currently undergoing refurbishment through assistance of TDC – what improvements are coming? Due to our track record (we’ve been offering educational ecotour services since 1997), TDC has partnered with us this year to assist us with refurbishment work to our Centre which would allow us to offer a better service in terms of eco-tourism and upgrading some parts of the facility. It’s a timely partnership and we do appreciate these types of partnerships because very often people look at these NGOs and think ‘you just want money to pay salaries’ or negative outlooks. But when we have an initiative also geared towards employing people from the community to be custodians of their natural environment as well as earn a living off of these services, it’s something that completes the full circle.

Why, in your view, is sustainability an important ideology now more than ever? Sustainability is an important topic of discussion, a word that’s being batted around, but if an investment is being put in - no matter what sector it is - there has to be a sustainability element in order to protect investment, whether it’s in human resources, physical assets or environmental capacity. It’s something we must all consider and it warrants a lot of study, especially in a country that had so much wastage and quick money.

Everything has an impact: looking at our carbon footprint, carbon foodprint, looking at ways in which we can aim toward sustainability. It’s not something that can happen overnight, it requires structures to be put in place and it’s something that people use very loosely but it’s very difficult to move toward sustainability.

Are there ways members of the public can get involved with the work of FACRP? They can keep up with our Facebook page – Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project (FACRP). We post things ever so often for the public to come and join in, whether it’s to be a volunteer at our signature events. We always need people who can help us fundraise, people who can help us during the _ re season just to be a support for our guys out in the field.

We don’t encourage members of the public to go fight fires because it’s too risky but to be a support. So sometimes there will be a call to action on our Facebook page and if people want to get more involved in the day-to-day operations of our organisation they can send us a message on Facebook where they will get all the details on how they can support us, how to volunteer, how to join.

What do you believe are the biggest challenges of sustainable lifestyles in TT? How can we overcome these challenges? Trying to live an eco-friendly life to purchase sustainable products! Most of the items have to be sourced internationally, which defeats the purpose of reducing our carbon footprint; we need to eat locally. There need to be more subsidies for locally produced stuff and to sort of encourage farmers and local producers to produce. Usually a local producer will be patronised only by close friends and family whereas it needs to be consumed in a broader sense.

Another thing affecting us is the lack of influence of the state to effect policies where it affects the manufacturing sector. If there’s no sort of push on a policy level to ban certain types of [materials] and a lack of recycling, there’s not enough policies from the top down. Most of the movement now is bottomup, the grassroots movements talking about the sustainable livelihood but it’s not coming from government policies.

We seem to get drowned out by all these seminars and workshops and conferences and there’s nothing materialising after that. There seems to be a disconnection between boardroom meetings and what’s happening out in the public.

…And your hopes for FACRP moving forward into the future? There are a lot of positives in moving forward. This year alone we’ve had four main partnerships. At the beginning of the year, we were part of a new initiative called the Climate Action by Civil Society in TT to Build Resilience to Climate Change.

This project aims to strengthen the capacity of five community organisations in TT to internationally accepted levels. We were chosen to be one of the five community groups participating in this project in collaboration with Conservation International and BHP TT. Coming out of that project we’re seeing ways in which we can better aim toward sustainable development within Fondes Amandes.

Another partnership that is ongoing is our field school initiative; a programme that is spearheaded by the Bridgewater State University of Boston, Massachusetts and it’s something that came out of our documentary “Earth Water Woman” where we looked at ways in which students can come to Fondes Amandes to get field experience here. It’s an opportunity for students who are part of multiple disciplines to come out in the field to do research projects to get [a sense of] the reality. We’re planning for the next intake of students in March next year.

There’s a lot in store for us!