By Sarah Otterstrom | Executive Director
Dear Friend,
We are so grateful to you for supporting our reforestation efforts in Central America, and also our big ambitious goal of launching the Machete Project early next year. Here are more details about the project shared in a press release during the Clinton Global Initiative.
Paso Pacífico and its partners announced a Commitment to Action at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) 2023 Meeting. Paso Pacífico will launch its open-source digital platform, the Machete Project, to catalyze forest restoration by connecting 300,000 youth with small-scale farmers.
According to the United Nations, nearly 3 billion people, many indigenous, reside in the rural moist tropics. This population often relies on the machete, a large steel knife, as a daily tool for their livelihoods in farming.
The machete can also be used to rebuild the forest. In a practice known as “farmer-mediated natural regeneration,” farmers expertly apply their tools to propagate trees grown from shoots and reduce weedy plants competing with young saplings.
“Small-scale and indigenous farmers are the forestry experts we need,” said Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, Ph.D., Executive Director of Paso Pacífico. “They know how to grow food for their families and are experienced at using tools to shape their environment. Yet, there’s a risk this knowledge will fade away as younger generations migrate to cities.”
The Machete Project platform provides tools needed to listen, learn, and document reforestation techniques in a digital format, enticing younger populations to connect with their hometown and become empowered as citizen scientists and visual storytellers.
Over the next three years, 300,000 youth and 2 million farmers will become engaged in this movement. Their efforts can catalyze the removal of more than a gigaton of greenhouse gasses and support a social fabric that sustains agroforestry and natural forests by recognizing the deep knowledge possessed by people who use traditional tools and their unique mastery of vegetation management.
The values that underpin the platform came about through Ashoka-ASPIRe, started in 2020 as a global initiative from Ashoka and Societal Thinking to support social entrepreneurs who seek to make a systemic impact through platform thinking and technology. Societal Thinking is an initiative of Ekstep Foundation that aims to help reimagine and realize exponential change.
The platform is possible thanks to commitment partner SoftServe and its crowdsourcing platform Open Tech. The software architecture has been generously supported by dozens of volunteers from SoftServe, including many programmers, business analysts, and engineers working from Ukraine.
Thank you for being a part of this ambitious effort to connect communities and slow climate change, and if you feel moved to make a gift to help us to continue forward in this endevour, please take action today, this #GivingTuesday.
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