A conservation program that has been creating jobs for thousands of poor and marginalized South Africans while protecting the country’s ecosystem from invasive plants for more than a decade is Africa’s biggest conservation program and one of South Africa’s most effective poverty relief instruments. The global program to help countries fight invasive species called it “a model for the world”.

Working for Water (WFW) currently employs about 29,000 people annually, and has cleared one million hectares since it began work in 1995. (About 700,000 hectares were cleared last year, but more than 80% of this is follow-up clearing of hectares that were originally cleared.) Its annual budget is more than $60 million. Teams clear fast-growing trees like the black wattle, one of several invasive Australian acacias, and blue gum, one of a few invasive Australian eucalyptus species, from areas where they crowd out indigenous trees, drawing down water supplies, increasing soil erosion and wildfire intensity, and threatening the productive use of land.

More than 9,000 alien plants have been introduced into South Africa, of which 348 have been classified as invasive, although not all are equally problematic. There are five different categories of invasive plants. Invasive plants have overrun 10 million hectares of land that could be used for conservation, agriculture, and watershed management. Many invasive plants use much more water than the indigenous plants they displace. A single blue gum, for example, can consume up to 100 gallons a day, so removing the trees is like putting water back in the system, says Guy Preston, the National Program Leader.

The program was initiated by Professor Kader Asmal in 1995, when he was Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry. It is administered through the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, and works in partnership with local communities, the Departments of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Agriculture, and Trade and Industry, provincial departments of agriculture, conservation and environment, research foundations, and private companies. It currently runs 220 projects in South Africa’s nine provinces.

Now part of the South African government’s “Expanded Public Works Program", WFW takes a labor intensive approach that aims to employ marginalized community members in rural areas while providing them with skill training, HIV/AIDS education, childcare, and support for families and communities. Sixty per cent of the labourers must be women, 20% "youth, and 2% disabled. The training in plants, ecosystems, and business skills such as how to tender for a project has helped many former labourers become independent contractors who can then tender to clear plots of land for the program.

Value-added product lines including furniture and household items produced from black wattle, mulch, and organic fertilizer, also have grown from the program. “I love what I do and can make a living from my business and I can provide opportunities for those working in my team to make a living as well,” says Malie Robertson, owner of Genadendal Natural Products. A mother of two, she began working with WFW in December 1995 as part of a team removing black wattle in the mountains where she played as a child. After learning how to weave wattle bark into baskets, she started her own business in 1999 with help from WFW’s Small Business Initiative.

One of the most unusual WFW offshoots is a project that uses wood cleared by the program to build coffins for the poor, for whom funerals can be very costly. In partnership with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, local religious leaders, and KwaZulu-Natal’s department of agriculture and environmental affairs, WFW won support from the World Bank’s Development Marketplace for the project in 2005 and employs 68 people currently making about 30 solid-wood, high-quality Eco-coffins a month that would be sold from $30 per coffin - a small fraction of what the poor must otherwise pay.

The success of the WFW program, which has won or been associated with more than 50 national and international awards, has inspired other similar South African poverty reduction programs that focus on restoring the ecosystem, including Working for Wetlands (restoring marshes); Working on Fire (preventing and controlling wildfires); and Working for Woodlands (reforesting subtropical thickets). The program also is inspiring other countries – Kenya’s mountainous tea plantation areas, for example, also are threatened by eucalyptus invasions. 

In December 2007, Dr. Preston was awarded the World Wildlife Foundation’s Lonmin Platinum Medal for creating “an amazing level of awareness of the dire threats presented to our ecosystems by alien invasive plants among both the public and policy makers” and for helping to develop programs that “are widely regarded across the world as model interventions in often-neglected environmental matters.”

This story was compiled from a variety of sources, including the Working for Water (South Africa) website; a workshop entitled Transforming Landscapes and Society: The Multiple Benefits of Restoration, Lessons from Yuma Heritage Area and South Africa’s Working for Water Program, March 16, 2007, Yuma, Arizona; Working for Water in South Africa: saving the world on a single budget?, Paddy Woodworth, World Policy Journal, Summer 2006; South Africa Puts the Unemployed to Work, Restoring Land and Water, Amanda Hawn, New York Times, July 26, 2005; Working for Water - and peace, Bua News, 22 July 2005 ; Working for Water: Removing Alien Plants in South Africa, Lois Sweet, IDRC, 21 May 1999; Dr Guy Preston honoured with Special Achievement Award at the Green Trust Awards 2002; Eco-friendly coffins spring to life, June 8, 2005; Update report to World Bank on eco coffins project ; Alien timber to become cheap, eco-friendly coffins, Cape Town, 07 November 2005; Invasive Alien Species Programme (IASP); and Restoring Natural Capital in South Africa. However, designation of invasive species can be controversial. For example, black wattle is grown in South Africa by about 2,700 farmers, forming about 9% of the country's commercial timber plantations, and the bark produces an extract that is used in tanning; beekeepers value the blue gum eucalyptus.

 

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