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Research Overview (Part 2): Firewood

A South Sudanese refugee carries firewood back to her home plot


Welcome back! We are hunkered down in our rooms at IRC right now in the middle of a thunderstorm. Temperatures have been averaging 100-103 F during the daytime, and this rain will bring much needed relief from the brutal heat. The worst part of the heat is actually the nighttime, when heat is trapped in our cement rooms. We cannot open our doors because scorpions and snakes have been known to enter, and sleeping outside is impossible because of mosquitoes. We are hoping for more comfortable sleep tonight thanks to this downpour.


I will now follow up on Research Overview (Part 1) where I describe the photo sorting activity we are using to understand refugee and host perceptions of tree benefits. My second study focuses on a primary challenge facing refugees in Imvepi and other Ugandan refugee settlements: access to firewood. Firewood is the by far the predominant source of cooking energy used by refugees, as well as nearby hosts. Charcoal is the second most common, and both products are sourced from forests and woodland areas around Imvepi’s boundary. As the refugee population increases (currently Imvepi hosts 65,000 refugees and more continue to arrive weekly from South Sudan), tree removal intensifies and tree access diminishes. This is especially the case for refugees, who are given small plots of land by the Ugandan government with few trees, and must forage at a distance from their home plots to find wood for cooking.


Certainly there are negative environmental implications associated with tree removal (soil erosion, more wind, less soil moisture and fertility, etc.), but there are also serious human welfare implications including increased energy expenditure, among women in particular, when walking far distances to collect heavy loads of wood. Refugees are on a severely constrained diet and many face malnutrition due to food aid reductions in recent years and climate change threatening agricultural production. This makes any extra energy expenditure dangerous. Firewood collection can also be a safety risk given reported instances of hosts, who own the land surrounding Imvepi, chasing or attacking refugees who try to cut firewood on their land. At the same time, these trips to the bush are also opportunities for refugees to collect wild edible, medicinal, and fiber products which are not available on their home plots. These include wild greens for sauce, the seeds of neem trees for treating malaria, or the stems of specific trees for making rope.


Mala fruits (Ximenia americana), cassava leaves, and a local green known as dodo collected during a firewood collection trip


I was clued into these challenges during my past two trips to Imvepi and, after consulting with my advisor Dr. John Munsell, decided to focus one of my dissertation chapters on refugee and host access and use of firewood and edible, medicinal, and fiber products from forests and woodlands. I also consulted with Dr. Melinda Laituri, an expert in participatory mapping, who turned me onto the transect walk methodology, where researchers accompany participants on walks to understand how they relate to their surrounding environments, connecting geospatial data with narrative, ethnographic data.


The firewood transect walks work like this: First, I provide blank paper and markers to participants and ask them to draw the route they most commonly take when fetching firewood (we vet folks first to make sure they do collect firewood). We ask them to also add important features along the route, such as a school, church, resting spot, or agricultural rental land. The purpose of this “cognitive map” is to get the participant thinking about the route in advance and prepare me as a researcher to be on the lookout for these important features. I ask the participant a few survey questions and then we wrap up our session and schedule a date for conducting the firewood transect walk.


A participant sketches a cognitive map of her firewood collection route


Cognitive sketch map indicating a participant's home, nearby church, river, resting spot, and firewood collection site


For the firewood walk itself, we try to pick a time when the participant would regularly be collecting firewood, even if we (my translator and I) were not attending. I bring along their sketch map, which is our guide for the firewood collection walk. As we set off, I cover a couple of things with the participant: 1) they should let me know if there are any potential firewood collection sites they avoid for reasons such as not knowing the landowner, fear of being chased away, difficult terrain, or simply low firewood abundancy, and 2) to be sure to point out any medicinal, edible, or fiber products they typically collect when harvesting firewood. I turn on my GPS to track the entire walking route, and also prepare a survey form using Fulcrum, a geospatial data collection tool, for marking any and all important points (e.g. firewood collected, medicinal plant collected, rental land, rest spot, firewood collection avoided for fear of conflict, etc.).


Eleven transect walks completed so far and routes uploaded into ArcGIS Pro


Walks so far have lasted about 2-4 hours. I will share more details in future posts on transect walk experiences. After we have walked, collected firewood/other items, and returned to the home, I weigh and measure the dimensions of firewood bundles. I also assess the weight and total market value of any other foods/medicines/fibers collected. Participants are compensated with 15,000 Ugandan shillings, which is a financial boost in the local economic context, and I carry water and snacks for both participants and my translators.


Aggregating across 240 walks, these forms of data collection will allow us to understand and compare how far refugees and hosts travel to collect firewood, the extra distance travelled by participants in order to avoid conflict or other avoidance factors, and nuanced ethnobotanical information about wild plants collected, including how they are prepared and used for sustaining human health and livelihoods. We have conducted just 11 walks—all with refugees so far—and have covered more than 42 miles collecting firewood, collected 15 different edible and 10 different medicinal products, and avoided 18 locations due to a fear of instigating conflict with nearby hosts. Across those 11 walks we also climbed 21 rocky slopes and crossed three rivers. The hardship has been staggering to witness. In total, these 11 refugees carried a cumulative 199.8 kilograms or 440.5 pounds of firewood. Multiple organizations have told me that this is the kind of data which could boost their ability to fundraise for tree planting interventions in refugee settings, which is precisely a central goal of this study.


Walking through a marsh to find firewood


Please stay tuned for more details and stories to come… and stay well in the meantime.

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4 Comments


Guest
Mar 29

This is all so amazing and fascinating to read and contemplate. Such richly meaningful and intense experiences you are going through. (And you write about it all very clearly, which is welcome.)

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Guest
Mar 27

Very interesting how collecting wood has impact on village

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Wycliff Talemwa
Wycliff Talemwa
Mar 25

I am curious, do refugees know in advance that they are going to be compensated? Does this change their attitude towards participation?

Are there any men involved in firewood collection?

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Sarah Juster
Sarah Juster
Mar 26
Replying to

Good questions... refugees are recruited a couple of days before we begin research activities and are informed of the compensation. The amount is intended to compensate for any lost work and incentivize participation.

Most households in Imvepi are female headed, and firewood collection is a also a gendered task, so we end up mostly working with woman. We try to recruit men at every other household, but have only ended up with 3 so far...

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