Charcoal producer groups bag local profits

Go out on most any street corner in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, and you will find black plastic bags of charcoal on sale for 30 cents a kilo. People here use it cook their meals, heat up mint tea or keep themselves warm in the cool winter months. The government subsidizes bottled gas, but charcoal still accounts for 26% of the energy consumed by households nationwide.

And it’s big business – for a precious few, that is. Each year, mostly migrant workers called sourga produce 300,000 metric tons of charcoal in Senegal’s poorest regions of Tambacounda and Kolda. Three quarters of this is sold in lucrative urban markets, the biggest being Dakar.

But those getting their hands dirty typically do not see much profit. Take Hassana Ba, 42, who has been making charcoal for 27 years. He’s eked by, barely managing to feed his three wives and seven children in the village of Sitaolé Isaac, where he has settled. In recent years, it’s been particularly tough going. Starting in January 2005, he worked for six months and produced 300 50-kilogram (110-pound) sacks of charcoal. He was given a sack of rice and a sack of millet for each of the six months. However, he didn’t receive payment for his charcoal until October 2006. Factoring in food costs, he earned the equivalent of $225 over a two-year period. In cash alone, it was $75. His story is common among the sourga.

Traditionally, charcoal production has been largely controlled by non-local traders who hire sourga to chop the wood and make charcoal. The sourga is given an advance of rice and goods; three months later the charcoal is collected and the account settled. Sourgas often end up in debt due to interest on cash advanced and the overpricing of goods provided. And in the charcoal-producing forests, with constant pressure to supply the market, the norm has been to clear-cut production areas with no regard for rate of regeneration, household firewood needs of women in nearby villages, or better uses of certain tree species.

In response, USAID’s agriculture and natural resource management (AG/NRM) program, known locally as Wula Nafaa, has begun working with the Senegalese Forest Service in Missirah’s Controlled Production Zone in the Tambacounda Region. The program helps increase producers’ share of revenues, and promotes conservation measures to improve forest regeneration.

By developing sustainable forest management plans with USAID project support, communities gain the right to harvest their own charcoal. The plans include regulated, scattered cutting that helps sustain forest resources over time.

In 2006, the AG/NRM program assisted 122 former sourgas to produce charcoal and market it themselves, bypassing traders. The USAID project team helped the workers organize themselves into marketing cooperatives, arranged trips to Dakar to calculate costs and make contacts, and facilitated access to credit to cover their production and transport costs.

It’s working. In the three months since production started, six charcoal producer groups working with the AG/NRM program have sold 135 metric tons of charcoal in Dakar, where charcoal fetches the best price. They earned a total net revenue of $12,500, or a profit of $4.64 per sack, compared to the $1.20 per sack that they would have earned if they had worked for non-local traders.

Since he started work with the AG/NRM program, Hassana Ba and the other 12 members of his group produced, transported, and marketed 300 sacks of charcoal in Dakar. In just three months, he has already netted $148; compared to the previous two years, he has earned more than half the money in just a seventh of the time.

Not a bad boost in profits, notes Ba: “The three months producing for myself was better than all of the last two years contracting with traders.”