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Summary Annual Report 2008 15
Examples of our work
Quote 2: “The Baka sell the best quality;
I am thinking of setting up a warehouse
in their village so they will sell only to
me.” (Mr. Abdou Ndi, wholesaler)
Results: Thanks to the radio system, the
Baka were able –for the first time everto
sell products for the going market
price (600 kilos of bush mango for
around 1,000 Euros). After the bush
mango season, the Baka were able to sell
another product that they had never sold
before (a big, round, flat nut called
Ebaye). The wholesaler –who came from
another province - paid the going market
price of 280 Euros for 1,000 Kilos. While
this is not much, the point is that it had
never been sold before and the Baka are
now gaining commercial experience and
– more importantly - confidence and
equal stature with other Cameroonians.
The aforementioned experiences are exciting,
but still tentative and require a lot
of follow-up. They need to become a routine
matter, well spaced throughout the
year, in order to ensure more stable income
and employment. The challenges
ahead are what to do with the profits as
well as how to diversify products to ensure
income throughout the year. There
is a continuing tendency to divide up the
money from the sales, instead of replenishing
the revolving fund.
SNV is coaching an experienced Local Capacity
Builder (LCB) 2 called FONJAK to
look into the issues of investing in community
projects as well as better management
of the revolving fund. The LCB
will take the lead in branching out into
other products available at other times of
the year, enabling product diversification
and introducing the cutting machine.
At the end of 2009, SNV hopes to hand
over its activities to this LCB.
Additional information:
Author: Raoul Ngueko,
Forest Team, SNV Cameroon,
rngueko@snvworld.org
Photographer: Luc Moutoni.
2 For SNV a local capacity builder (LCB) is any type
of actor that provides capacity development services
to intermediate-level actors in order to reduce
poverty, and is owned and run within the country
or regional context.
II Case Mali
Robust alliances
A SNV program builds multi-level partnerships
to improve health standards in
Mali.
Context: In 1993, Mali’s newly-elected
democratic government adopted a policy
of administrative decentralisation. The
policy divided Mali into 703 municipalities,
which were responsible for managing
their own public sector services. To
reinforce the decentralisation process,
the state began to transfer resources to
the municipalities.
The transfer of resources in the health
sector, however, posed some problems.
Since 1990, a legal convention had charged
Mali’s local (community) health associations
(ASACO) with the management
of communal health services. The state’s
decision to transfer health resources to
the municipalities thus created ambiguity
over the roles and responsibilities of the
two bodies.
Since 2003, to facilitate the transfer of
resources and encourage collaboration
between the ASACO and municipalities,
SNV Mali and KIT (Royal Institute for the
Tropics) have been running a pilot program
called “Partners in Health”. Comanaged
by the Koulikoro Regional Office
for Health and the Ministry of Health’s decentralisation
support cell (CADD-MS);
the programme aims to develop efficient
local partnerships by:
- establishing conventions between the
Associations for Community Health
(ASACO);
- assisting with yearly planning and monitoring;
and
- facilitating the transfer of skills from
national/regional to local authorities.
What has SNV done? SNV assisted
throughout the establishment and execution
of the pilot program. In 2004, the
pilot was first run in Wacoro and Nangola,
two municipalities in the Koulikoro region
of Mali. SNV set up channels of communication,
organised evaluations and mee-
SNV West & Central Africa