Job Creation:  

CBNRM helps to create jobs through small group enterprises and improved linkages with commercial sector partnerships.  This reduces economic dependency on illegal or destructive resource uses on communal land.

The African College for CBNRM provides appropriate skills to small household groups to promote small-scale businesses.  Its approach is to facilitate the creation and success of an initial number of groups in an area and to use local trainers thereafter to encourage additional groups to form.  This is why the success of the first groups is so important so that other households will become interested in forming groups and seek  opportunities for earning additional income.  

These efforts are relatively new in the history of the College and efforts have been directed mostly at the following products: honey, agri-products like rice, cooking oil and vegetable production, citrus fruit, poultry, small commodity shops, and furniture making.  Initial response from these efforts are very encouraging.  Not only do households gain new skills for making additional income, but they also learn how to share ideas as a group and to lobby for ways their Village Area Group (VAG) or CRB leaders can support them with further training or inputs.  As a result, the ADMADE community institutional structure becomes strengthened by having more people participate in it to gain livelihood benefits. The result is a trend toward reduced resource use disturbances.

ADMADE has not made strong progress in building partnership links between the commercial sector and local communities, despite the presence of tourist operators in most all Game Management Areas and the potential for increasing local employment through such linkages.  By training community leaders in skills to help forge joint-venture relationship or to negotiate ways community groups could provide services to an operator, the College hopes that such linkages will soon develop. For example, CRB leadership may be able to negotiate a service contract with a particular VAG to provide a specific number of trained Village Scouts to a lodge to help escort tourists or to police a particular area where an operator derives much of its profits. 

Results from studies by the College do show that if households have more income, especially toward the end of the dry season, a greater number would be able to afford agricultural inputs and thereby have greater food security.  Food security and personal income are related and the College is trying to tackle the challenge of making households food secure in Game Management Areas by also addressing the need for increasing personal incomes.

KEY Lesson:  Small group enterprises allow group members to share ideas for improving individual efforts to earn income, reduce costs by sharing labor costs for securing inputs or marketing outputs, and increase household effectiveness to lobby their elected leaders for additional help.

KEY Lesson: By increasing personal income, households are more likely to obtain agricultural/food inputs for achieving food security.  This in turn reduces household dependency on wildlife for illegal sources of food or income.

KEY Lesson: Developing market linkages with commercial sector partners by community groups requires skills in planning, negotiating, and conflict resolution.  Joint-venture relationship, while more challenging terms of the level of sophistication needed by community leaders, represents important source of additional income for communities living in areas where resource commodities have a commercial potential for sustained uses.