Wood and charcoal still furnish the most important household energy - i.e. cooking energy - for more than four-fifths of the Senegalese population. At the same time Senegal’s forest resources are subject to high pressure. Particularly in the northern and central parts of the country they are becoming scarce.

Managed by the ECO, the program component "Participatory Forest Management" of the PERACOD program by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH makes a significant contribution to the sustainable supply of cooking energy and to the conservation of the resource.

The effectiveness of the approach, which had been developed in cooperation with local experts, was tested in a representative array of pilot forests. Today, a total of almost 500 men and women manage the forests on their own, thereby sustaining their livelihoods to a significant degree.

Producing and trading timber and other forest products is often one of only a few opportunities to earn money in the rural area and finance the education of children, medical expenses or necessary purchases. This is why the project contributes very significantly to the fight against rural exodus.

The excellent results in the pilot zones have led four Senegalese regions to approach the PERACOD program and to jointly develop a strategy for upscaling the approach at regional level. In unprecedented cooperation, PERACOD/ ECO, the region, and the regional Forest Service engage for the expansion of cultivated areas and for accompanying measures (training, dissemination of energy-saving stoves, etc.). Thus, additional partners and external funding to implement the "regional action plans" could already be won, which are needed in the initial phase, up to the point of break-even of the management system.

As it were, Senegal has now achieved a degree of decentralized management of its forest resources rare in the francophone and African context. This has also found much attention in the neighboring countries.

Today, about 25,000 hectares of forest are managed in a participatory manner, and management is being prepared for another 40,000 ha. Even though first additional financing schemes are secured, the alpha and omega of successful upscaling will be the development of additional sources of funding and a further empowerment of local authorities in the areas of financial management, control, and monitoring.
At the same time the program makes an important contribution to the modernization and professionalization of the value chain by means of targeted training measures in production and marketing for local stakeholders.