Community Development

Harapan Rainforest is home to a group of indigenous people known as the Bathin Sembilan. Many of these people still follow a semi-nomadic lifestyle, harvesting fruits, rattan and honey from the forest. Very few native people are still able to follow this lifestyle in Indonesia due to the pressure of deforestation and development all around them.

There are eight indigenous family groups (guguk) living within Harapan Rainforest and many living on the outskirts of the forest. This initiative, whilst preserving the largest remaining fragment of dry lowland forest of Sumatra, also gives hope that local forest dependent communities can maintain chosen aspects of their traditional lifestyles. Without the intervention of Harapan Rainforest and its partner organisations this area would almost certainly have been logged and converted to agricultural or industrial tree plantations. In the process, this would have displaced these families making their forest-dependant lifestyles completely unrealistic.

The challenge of the community team is to work with the indigenous families within Harapan Rainforest and forest-using communities around it, respecting their traditional use rights in this area and identifying, where desired, further opportunities for them to sustainably exploit the forest resources whilst restoring, and safeguarding the forest’s enormous biodiversity.

At present the community team is involved in a number of projects with the indigenous communities. These include:

1. The Bathin Sembilan are marginalised from mainstream Indonesian society and do not generally have access to government services such as education and healthcare. To alleviate this a mobile school has been established and is currently teaching 32 indigenous children how to read and write. 
2. Some local communities have difficulty in accessing government services. We are addressing this in various ways. For example in one case we are supporting the salaries of primary school teachers and the provision of teaching materials in return for better parental involvement and improved school attendance. In a similar way, we are supporting the provision of midwifery services in return for community support of child healthcare programmes and are developing a programme to aid the distribution of affordable medicine to the community. In the past we have assisted in increasing registration of local communities for the government's poverty alleviation payments and enabled access to the low-cost rice programme (RASKIN).
3. Communities need alternatives to illegal logging. We have initiated programmes to investigate potential alternatives. Examples include coordinating the collection and processing of rattan and the cultivation of Rosella Hibiscus sabdariffa Linn. (a plant known for its medicinal properties and able to be processed by the community for the production and retail of Rosella tea) and in providing links to the local markets to increase revenue for the indigenous people.
4. Our largest single contribution to the improvement of livelihoods and capacity building within local communities has been the recruitment and training of over 140 people as forest patrols and inventory teams. This has involved developing many new skills such as fire fighting, first aid, forest law, which these teams are able to make use of both whilst working and when back in their communities.

Plans for the future include:

1. Working alongside KKI-Warsi (Jambi's pre-eminent NGO working on forest community issues) to prepare community resource management agreements with the forest-using communities to support the restoration work of Harapan Rainforest.
2. Identification with the communities of non-timber product business opportunities in the form of rosella tea, rattan and resam (Dicranopteris linearis) for handicrafts, and the cultivation of jernang (Daemonorops sp.) for use as medicine.
3. Building capacity within the community to grow and take advantage of higher quality seedlings to increase the productivity of rubber and similar tree crops, planted outside the forest boundaries, thus reducing the pressure on the forest and in the longer term allowing the restoration of forest areas previously used by the communities.
4. Identification of sources of finance, such as micro credit schemes or similar social and community programmes with which to initiate sustainable longer term alternative incomes.
   
5. Set up cooperatives to increase welfare for employees and communities within and around Harapan Rainforest. Activities will include savings and loans, business and financing and micro credit schemes for plant seedlings.