The forest and its people
Adivasi communities depend on the forest for sustenance and livelihoods. While Adivasis continue engaging with the forest—whether for sustenance or for sale of harvested produce (called Minor Forest Products)—they have stakes in the forest and are natural guardians of the forests. Securing sustainable livelihoods among such forest communities can go a long way in improving the quality of forest conservation.
Forest Post helps Adivasi communities, mainly women, find a creative and dignified source of income through their engagement with forests, so that they are not forced to move to towns to seek menial jobs. The forest is their home, has been for generations, and they almost always know where and when to find wild resources and how much to harvest so that there is enough left for regenerating in the next season, and for other biodiversity. Thus, ‘sustainability’, in its applied sense, is embedded in native tribal wisdom.
We help tribals assert value by incentivising harvest of unconventional MFPs, by training and upskilling them for quality-controlled value-addition, so that the finished product can compete in the marketplace.
Our background
Forest Post was registered in 2021 with seed support from UNDP-India. However, the skilling, training and trust-building, with the communities and the Forest Department, had begun about six years earlier, in the course of Dr Manju Vasudevan’s work with Dr Latha Anantha and colleagues at River Research Centre, Trichur. As a for-profit, social impact enterprise, Forest Post aims to improve livelihood security of tribal communities, while becoming independent of grants and external funding. The aim is to make forest communities and Dharaa Livelihood Initiative, the parent organization, self-sustaining.
Dharaa is empanelled with TRIFED (Tribal Co-Operative Marketing Development Federation of India Ltd. under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Govt. of India). We also consult to the Forest Development Agency of the Kerala State Forest Department in their objective to enhance forest-based livelihoods. We are listed on The Good Market and verified as a People and Planet First organization. All products are made by Adivasi women working as collectives under the aegis of the state Forest Department, or independently. Our indigenous women’s enterprises are spread across nine villages in central Kerala’s Western Ghats; we also engage indirectly with communities in Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and the Andamans.
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Supporting partners
We began in 2017 as a Project supported by the Keystone Foundation in the Nilgiris and as part of the activities of a grassroots network under the Global Alliance for Gender and Green Action (GAGGA). Three years down, there came the need to create market linkages, streamline production and supply from all Adivasi women’s collectives and create a viable business model. This crucial support came from UNDP- India. Going forward, our marketing efforts would be channelised through Dharaa Livelihood Initiative LLP, registered in July 2021.
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Women and youth associates
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