kinariwebb

Absolutely! But only if the local communities are the ones that identify health care as a cause of doing something that they don't actually want to do. If you are a subsistence agriculturalist and are growing enough to eat, what do you need money for? A wedding, a house, and health care are often the critical things. But health care is the only thing that can't wait until you've collected money -- and that you will do anything to get. When we started 99% of the people wanted to protect the forest -- they just couldn't because they were missing critical knowledge and resources. The thing is that our experience in scouting out sites for replication, is that this story is very common and health care needs often drive over-exploitation of the environment.

Great question. The handicrafts we sell for cash. The seedlings and manure we use for reforestation. This works because in the funding world it is vastly easier to get money for reforestation than for health care funding. So we can use the grant money for purchasing seedlings to "buy" the seedlings from the health care side of our work. When people pay with labor it makes everything we do cheaper. But actually most people choose to pay with cash -- they just love that they have this option because it means that they never have to worry about affording care. They never have to log to pay for health care. It should also be noted that the prices in our clinic are very low. It costs about what a bowl of soup costs to see a doctor.

We went from an estimated 1350 logging households when we started to about 450 after five years. Now, after 9 years, we are down to about 180 individuals! My experience is that this is a better approach because you are doing exactly the things that are causing people to destroy their environment. People were logging to pay for health care and because they didn't have the skills for an alternative livelihood. In addressing both of these things simultaneously, the effect was synergistic.

Exactly, but actually our "normal" price is still lower than the cost in the city two and half hours away which is where people would have to go otherwise. So our un-discounted price is doubly less expensive because you also don't have to pay as much for transportation.

The proof is in the pudding. During the first year of our program we spent over 400 hours listening to communities. We said, "You all are guardians of a precious rain forest that is valuable to the whole world, what would you need as a 'thank you' from the world community so that you could protect it?" They asked for high quality, affordable health care and training in organic farming. We did both of those things and sure enough, five years later the illegal logging had plummeted! I don't believe that outsiders can ever know what the most efficient and critical fulcrums of change are. Communities know that and my experience is that, by consensus, they can all agree what those issues are.