Draft Guide to Community Based Forest Management in Malawi 2001

This field guide has been prepared with the aim of creating a better understanding of the problems facing Malawi’s forestry sector and the role that communities may be able to play in solving them. It is intended as a handbook for those involved in promoting or practising forest management at village level – frontline extension staff of central and local government, traditional leaders, non-governmental organisations and the wider public. Although this first version is written in English, it is intended to reprint the guide in Chichewa and Chitumbuka in order to make it more  accessible to forest users and village institutions. It is not an extension manual; neither does it give technical advice on forest management or silviculture. Instead, the following pages provide an overview of the new opportunities for community based forest management, and the processes through which it may be achieved.