Wild Heritage
It’s mid-morning in Uganda’s Mabira rainforest on the shores of Lake Victoria. Godliver Businge stands outside her home, full of good spirit and ready to get to work. Around her, a gathering of women steadily forms, creating a circle around an outdoor stove, as the sweet aromas of barbecue rise into the tree canopy. At first glance, this is a familiar scene — women preparing a meal for their families and community. Yet, within this seemingly routine gathering, a quiet revolution is taking shape. Each woman here is participating in a training course, learning to craft and cook with charcoal briquettes made from organic waste — part of a grassroots conservation effort aimed at protecting Uganda’s last standing forests. Mabira Forest spans 74,000 acres of forests, hilltops and verdant stream valleys in central Uganda. In the forest, wide-eyed, gray cheeked mangabey monkeys hang from the branches, while flocks of tit-hylia songbirds flit through the leaves and violet-winged butterflies perch on flowering plants. The Mabira forest is one of the only places in the world to host these rare species of monkeys, birds, and butterflies. The survival of these species, however, depends on the survival of Mabira itself. The richly biodiverse Mabira reserve is the largest remaining block of semi-evergreen rainforest in the Victoria Basin. It is also home to settled human enclaves that depend on the forest. Today, the prevalence of deforestation threatens the forest’s longevity, along with the communities, human and otherwise, living in or around it. “One of the biggest rainforests in Africa — the Mabira Forest — is now a forest just by the roadside,” says Businge, the Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) Uganda program lead and a co-founder of the Uganda Women’s Water Initiative (UWWI). “But if you go behind it, the forest has been cut down.” Uganda has lost nearly a third of its tree cover in the past two decades, much of it to logging for charcoal production. Reporter Claire Greenberger writes about women leaders innovating a new way forward by using organic waste — mostly food scraps that would otherwise go uneaten — instead of wood, to make charcoal briquettes.
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