Stories from the forest.

Leaders in Zortarpa, Nimba County, have pledged more than 600 acres of community forest for conservation. The pledge followed a free, prior and informed consent process, so every family had the chance to hear the plan and agree to it.

The pledge was part of our Sustainable Land Conservation project with the UNDP/GEF Small Grants Programme, which ran from February to October 2026 in Zortarpa and Yekepa Camp 4. The project worked with 100 participants: 81 women and 19 men. Of the 100, 51 were young people, both women and men, so some young women are counted in both figures.

Fifty people trained as beekeepers, fifty farmers learned sustainable farming on an 8.1-acre plot, and four savings groups with 100 members are now meeting. Next, we will support Zortarpa through the steps to formal recognition of its community forest.

From January 2027, our work runs as one programme: Green Livelihoods and Resilient Communities. It brings together four steps we have already tested in Nimba and Bong: Peace, Protect, Skill and Save.

Each community moves through the steps over about 24 months: disputes are settled, the forest is protected, people learn skills that earn, and savings groups keep the gains. Farmers grow cocoa, coffee and oil palm on land already farmed, with cassava, rice, vegetables, pepper and groundnut for income in the first years, and many keep bees.

We start in Zortarpa and Yekepa Camp 4 in 2027. By 2031 we aim to reach 10,000 people and to share the model, with its manuals, curricula and forms, so partners and government can use it too.

With ActionAid Liberia, we added ten beehives for women beekeepers in David Dean’s Town, Bong County. We aimed to reach 25 women and reached 34.

The women also formed an all-women savings group, so income from honey can be saved and lent for more hives.

Between October 2023 and August 2024 we led the Nimba component of Delivering Peace Dividends in Liberia with FAO and the UN Peacebuilding Fund, in five conflict-prone communities around Sanniquellie.

We trained 175 young people and rural women, 151 of them women, in entrepreneurship and savings groups. They formed ten savings groups, double the target, all led by women. We completed every planned activity even though funds arrived up to five months late.