Millions of farm families in Africa live on barely farmable, semi-arid land and earn less than 50 cents per day. KOMAZA partners with these families to unlock the economic potential of tree farming. Our trees thrive in the low-quality soil of semi-arid environments where most foodcrops cannot be farmed productively. KOMAZA's innovative model turns our farmers' marginal land into a productive tree farm and gives them access to world class output processing and marketing for their trees. The result is a life-changing income increase for some of the poorest families on earth.
Farm Family Partnerships
KOMAZA begins the community planting process by identifying a set of families that meet our criteria. The families we choose must be both responsible and very needy, typically owning only a few barely-farmable acres of land, including at least one acre that is significantly underutilized. We collect information on families by reaching out to communities in a number of ways, most frequently through community organizations such as schools and churches. Community groups partner with us to create project awareness, and this generates a number of applications from interested families
Once our initial group of prospective families is identified, KOMAZA hires a Field Officer who is local to their community. The Field Officer holds group training meetings with all prospective families, teaching them how to prepare their land for the planting of a tree farm. Families who attend all meetings and make the effort of preparing their land for planting are then selected as KOMAZA partners.
KOMAZA provides tree seedlings and all necessary planting inputs to our selected families, who then plant the trees themselves with advice from their Field Officer. The Field Officer works with families to teach them how to maintain their trees, including early watering, intercropping, weeding and pest monitoring. This carefully developed process allows us to provide responsible, needy farmers with valuable training and ownership over their own tree farms.
Uniting the Value Chain
Tree farming on a small scale can be profitable, but it does not come close to realizing the full potential of trees that are properly raised, processed and marketed. We call this the "value chain" —all the factors between when a tree is planted and when the end product is sold that determine its value. Working independently, tree farmers can earn some income from their trees, but earning falls far below potential.
Working collectively with large groups of farmers, KOMAZA can help them realize the tremendous economies of scale possible with tree farming. Besides giving farmers access to top-quality inputs and tree farming practices, we can process trees in large quantities and give small-scale farmers access to the large timber markets that demand higher-quality products.
KOMAZA unites the tree farming value chain for our farmers by managing the extraction, processing and marketing of their trees. We harvest a portion of trees from our farmers every few years on a fixed schedule. With each harvest, trees can be processed into progressively higher-profit products. At first, they will yield charcoal and building poles, then sawn lumber and finally very high-value electricity poles. We have already identified a number of businesses eager to purchase our products.
While on their own, farmers would likely be able to sell trees only as low-profit charcoal or fuel wood. Working with KOMAZA, they can earn many times that amount by selling higher-profit tree products on larger markets. KOMAZA splits these high profits with our farmers, and the result is large amounts of life-changing income for some of the world's poorest families. KOMAZA then uses our share of the profits to expand and include even more families in our organization.
